Thread by @doctorow

Christopher Brown is a mild-mannered, hard-fighting Austin environmental lawyer who writes taut, intense, post-cyberpunk novels about deep green resistance movements fighting guerilla wars against American fascism.

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His first book, 2017's Tropic of Kansas, tells the story of a semi-feral boy whose parents have been murdered by a hyperauthoritarian US government, as he is transformed into a guerilla hero.

boingboing.net/2017/07/11/tro…

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The second book, 2019's "Rule of Capture," is a paranoid, claustrophobic, gripping legal thriller about Donny Kimoe, an ex-prosecutor whose conscience demands he become the defense attorney for captured rebels who face being rendered to black sites.

boingboing.net/2019/08/12/fre…

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Now, with Failed State, a standalone novel, we return to Donny Kimoe, eking on a living as a contingency lawyer on the periphery of a post-revolutionary shattered America, with little by way of government or justice system.

harpercollins.com/9780062859129/…

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Kimoe is persona non grata among the rebels, thanks to his decision to defend the deposed former President for his war crimes, determined to live his principles and his belief in justice for all.

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But the establishment doesn't like him any better, probably because his major project is finding loopholes in the amnesty agreements that let him sue the plutes whose companies ran the extermination and slave labor camps for the former government.

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It's one of these cases that sends Donny to the rebel stronghold of New Orleans, a city he's been barred from returning to on pain of death, where the rebels have invented a new form of environmental justice.

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In their courts, major shareholders of world-raping industries are tried and found guilty of extracting wealth by murdering the world's plants and animals, and they (or their descendants) are ordered to make good for their crimes.

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The novel is as tense and thrilling as any of Brown's work, and as full of rage and hope. It's a novel that truly reckons with the enormity of both our climate emergency and the system that produced it - with human imperfection and redemption.

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It may be easier to imagine the end of the human race than it is to imagine the end of capitalism, but Brown makes a pretty good case that they may yet annihilate one another.

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I'm appearing with @NB_Chris Aug 12 in a (virtual) book launch at Austin's @BookPeople:

bookpeople.com/event/virtual-…

He's a hell of a conversationalist, too - this is worth dialing in for!

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