AUSTRALIAN SF WRITER T R NAPPER JOINS JJLA
Australian SF writer T R Napper has joined the John Jarrold Literary Agency.
His debut novel is Thirty-Six Streets - a cyberpunk thriller with lashings of military SF: Ghost in the Shell meets Apocalypse Now. Set around 150 years in the future.
Lin ‘The Silent One’ Vu is a gangster and sometime private investigator. Born in Vietnam, raised in Australia, everywhere an outsider. She lives in Chinese-occupied Hanoi, in the steaming, paranoid alleyways of the Old Quarter – known as the Thirty-Six Streets.
Through grit and courage Lin has carved a place for herself in the Vietnamese underworld. But when an Englishman comes to Hanoi in search for answers over the murder of his dear friend, Lin’s life is turned upside down. She is drawn into the grand conspiracies of the neon gods: of regimes and mega-corporations, as they unleash dangerous new technologies in a quest for absolute power. Lin must confront the immutable moral calculus of an unjust war. She must choose: family, country, or gang. Blood, truth, or redemption. No choices are easy on the Thirty-Six Streets.
T R Napper worked in international development for around fourteen years in Mongolia, Laos, and Vietnam, and various other places in Southeast Asia and East Asia. He is a basic education specialist, designing and managing programs aimed at enabling ethnic minority children in remote areas to attend primary school (in communities where they would never have set foot in a school otherwise).
More recently he has been a stay-at-home dad and writer. He has returned to Australia after three years in Hanoi, where all he did was read battered science fiction paperbacks, explore the city with his son, and write, write, write in all the spaces in between.
T R Napper began writing fiction in 2013. Since then he’s sold sixteen short stories, including one to the prestigious Asimov’s magazine, several to the excellent Interzone, and numerous others. His short fiction has been translated into Hebrew, French, German, and Vietnamese.
In 2017 he won the Aurealis Award for Best Short Story for “Flame Trees”, (Asimov’s Science Fiction, April/May 2016); and another of his stories “A Strange Loop” (Interzone, January/February 2016) was included in Neil Clarke’s Best Science Fiction of the Year. He is in the final stages of a creative writing doctorate in Noir, Cyberpunk, and Asian Modernity.
Among several current jobs, he works as a dungeon master for the local community centre, running a D&D campaign for young people with autism.
“I read this novel across a weekend,” said John Jarrold. “Enthralled, gripped and loving it, despite darkness and emotional wrenches. It’s wonderful, and I’m very proud to welcome T R Napper (Tim) to the agency family!”