Saturday, April 10, 2010

"He Walked Among Us"

Norman Spinrad is a science fiction icon and the author of more than twenty novels which have been translated into over a dozen languages. His 1969 novel, Bug Jack Barron, was nominated for the Hugo and Nebula Awards and his short fiction collection, The Star-Spangled Future, was a National Book Award finalist. He has also written screenplays for American television series, including the original Star Trek.

He applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, He Walked Among Us, and reported the following:
Page 69 is not representative of He Walked Among Us . No single page or even chapter would be, since the novel is written from four diverse points of view. A science fiction writer. A sleazy talent agent for sleazy comedians. A New Age lecturer and sometime actress. And Foxy Loxy, a far gone crack addict street girl and hooker. The prose of each of these viewpoint characters reflects their diverse consciousnesses, and that of Foxy Loxy is the most extreme and extremely divergent. Like most of my novels, the style or styles is that of the viewpoint characters themselves, and in something like He Walked Among Us, with four viewpoint characters and four different styles, four different subjective realities, nothing is representative of anything else. As Amanda's mantra puts it, "What is, is real."
Learn more about the book and author at Norman Spinrad's website.

Check out the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue