Nik Korpon has been signed to Angry Robot. His novel The Rebellion’s Last Traitor, which will be released through Angry Robot in June 2017.
I’m so thrilled to finally be working with Angry Robot. What better place to publish a story about scrappy, upstart rebels than the feisty, upstart robots who have taken over the book world. Then again, my book is also about memory thieves, so maybe I’ve been here the whole time . . .
I wasn’t supposed to write a sci-fi book. The Rebellion’s Last Traitor follows Henraek Laersen, the disgraced leader of a failed rebellion in Eitan City. Henraek now works as a memory thief, stealing memories from the people he had been trying to save. He’s under the supervision of Walleus Blaí, his best friend and former second-in-command—and also now a high-ranking member in the brutal, authoritarian Tathadann Party.
When I started the book, it was a crime novel, because I was a crime writer. Sure, it had been set slightly in the future and people consumed memories like a drug, but it was modeled on post-Katrina New Orleans and continued my obsession with writing about thieves and identity and revolutions (which is a whole ’nother essay in itself) and when Henraek consumes a memory he discovers that his wife—whom he’d been told was killed in a riot he incited—had actually been murdered, it sets him hurtling down a path of revenge.
I submitted it to my dream agent—who, yea!, has since become my actual agent—and she responded somewhere along the lines of “It’s good, but American dystopia is a really tough sell. What if it was more sci-fi?”
That thought paralyzed me. I’d never written sci-fi before. Some of my short stories were weird, but that was a product of watching too much David Lynch when I was younger. I wrote about cities and crime and criminals. I wrote about thieves and fathers and drugs. There were guns in my stories, but they were Rugers, not ray guns. After a couple days of panic and telling myself I should just quit, I found the liner notes from If I Should Fall From Grace With God, which led to one of my many Pogues listening binges. And later, sitting there in my basement, rereading Shane MacGowan’s lyrics with my kids climbing over me, something sparked in my head.
I lived in England for a while and, here in Baltimore, hung out with a lot of Irish guys (some from the Republic, some from Northern Ireland) while playing Gaelic football and hurling. One of the things that always fascinated me was the way they talked about home. It echoed lyrics from the final chorus of “Thousands are Sailing,” one of my favorite Pogues songs—and, incidentally, the song I used to sing my kids when they were newborns, along with “Folsom Prison Blues,” because I didn’t know any children’s songs—where MacGowan belts out, “Where e’er we go we celebrate the land that makes us refugees.” How, regardless of how bad things got, they always looked fondly, wistfully (though not necessarily truthfully), on home. Not that they’d actually go back, mind, because things had been better for them here, but knowing that the possibility existed was enough.
Writing something near to present day wasn’t going to work with the story, I thought. Society in Eitan had crumbled too much and the Tathadann regime was too strong, not to mention the events of the book were skewing dangerously close to the newspapers. (Also another essay: editing scenes from the aforementioned fictional riot in the morning, then having my office evacuated because of the Baltimore riots a block away that afternoon. It was weird, to say the least.) Pushing it a couple hundred years into the future would help, but then there was the issue of preaching, of writing a novel that too closely commented on the current state of things. Again, while listening to the Pogues in my car—it had become my son’s favorite CD—and mulling over feedback from my agent, I wondered why I couldn’t set it in another country, a fictional one that was just a couple ticks away from reality (because I don’t have that good of an imagination), a country that had once been green and lush but now was scorched after years of war and rebellion. Almost like Hell, but not quite. Maybe a county near Hell. Maybe Henraek and Walleus were boys from the county hell. (That’s a Pogues song if you hadn’t picked up on the theme yet.)
As the world of Westhell County began to come together, I still puzzled over the whole science-fiction aspect. Just add some holograms and a ray gun, part of me said. Stop being a dick, another part said. Like any writer who is stuck, I went to IMDB to read the trivia section. Pretty soon, though, my procrastination turned into research. I started scrolling through lists of science-fiction films, thinking about the ones I loved and why I loved them.
One that kept coming back to me was Blade Runner—which, to my mind, is essentially a crime story in a science-fiction world. It’s also one of the great examinations of identity, of what it means to be human, of how important stories are in our collective experience. Not to mention it has one of my favorite endings of all time, in which Rick Deckard has to confront what he’s become and who he really is. Similarly, by the end of Traitor, Henraek must do the same. Is he actually a traitor? Is he still a rebel? Was he the husband and father he remembers himself to be, or is he simply filtering out what doesn’t fit that narrative and refilling his skull with others’ memories?
Whether it’s flaming ships on Orion’s Belt or mailing postcards of blue skies from rooms daylight never sees, the definition of ourselves is never simple or logical or finite. Which isn’t a bad thing, because if it were, we’d have no reason to write books in an attempt to figure it out.
(You thought I was going to end with tears in the rain, didn’t you?)
About the book:
The novel is half crime/half sci-fi in a full dystopian setting. Imagine Blade Runner crossed with Inception and the Easter Uprising of 1916 – a strange combination, we know, but it works.
After decades of war, the brutal Tathadann Party restored order in Eitan City by outlawing the past in order to rewrite history. Memory became a commodity—bought and sold, and experienced like a drug.
For ten years, Henraek and Walleus led a people’s rebellion, until Walleus recognized what the others couldn’t: the Struggle was doomed. He joined the Tathadann, and Henraek, hurt and angry, incited a riot that killed his own wife and son.
Now Henraek works as a Tathadann memory thief, draining citizens’ memories while mourning his family. The people call him a traitor to his face; Tathadann spies whisper he’s a traitor behind his back. Walleus protects Henraek, but Henraek knows that loyalty has its limits.
Then everything changes when Henraek harvests a memory of his wife’s death. He will do whatever it takes to learn the truth—even if it means burning Eitan City to the ground.
About Nik Korpon:
Nik Korpon is the author of several books, including The Soul Standard and Stay God, Sweet Angel. He lives in Baltimore with his wife and two children.
