“If you want to have a healthy society, people need to believe there is justice and accountability for people who do bad things. The problem in this society is that it’s a really bottom-heavy system.”
He wowed us last year with Tropic of Kansas, and now Christopher Brown is back to talk about his brand-new dystopian legal thriller, Rule of Capture (both from Harper Voyager)! We get into his grand jury stint a few years ago and how it brought home to him the inequality of the law and led to this new novel, why there are so few lawyers in science fiction (but so many in comic books), and the challenge of writing a novel about the law as opposed the facts of a legal case. Along the way, we get into his search for utopia and why he’s eschewing dystopia with this next novel, the phenomenon of Texan billboard-lawyers (like his novel’s protagonist, Donny Kimoe), his love of Njals saga, the Icelandic poem about a lawyer who’s ridiculed by other vikings because he can’t grow a beard, the little capitulations we make that lead to the domestication of evil, his unsung legal heroes, and what one should or shouldn’t do if one finds oneself on an escalator behind a certain Supreme Court Justice. Give it a listen! And go buy Rule of Capture! (and check out our 2018 episode)
“This book provided me an opportunity to do things with the character of the lawyer that my evil lawyer twin might wish to do in real life.”
“I want to write a science fiction that’s made up from the material of the observed world, that has a kind of naturalism to it.”
“So many of our social, political, economic and other problems and injustices are rooted in the damaged relationship we have with the land.”
“What astonishes me today, as someone who’s worked in Washington with people on both sides of aisle, is how malleable people’s principles are.”
Christopher Brown is the author of Tropic of Kansas, a finalist for the 2018 John W. Campbell Award for best science fiction novel of the year. His new novel Rule of Capture, the beginning of a series of speculative legal thrillers, is out now from Harper Voyager. He was a World Fantasy Award nominee for the anthology Three Messages and a Warning: Contemporary Mexican Short Stories of the Fantastic. His short fiction and criticism has appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies, including MIT Technology Review,LitHib, Tor.com, and The Baffler. He lives in Austin, Texas, where he also practices law. He’s active on Twitter and Instagram.
He wowed us last year with Tropic of Kansas
