“I wanted to use the idea of a biotech-mediated apocalypse and its afterworld to test some personal hypotheses.”

Howard V. Hendrix
Empty Cities of
the Full Moon

Available at:
Amazon.com
BarnesandNobel.com

ISBN: 0345455967

Books

The Labyrinth Key

(Del Rey BOOKS, APRIL 2004 RELEASE)

In 2015, the United States and China are locked in an informational arms race centered around the development of a quantum computer with codemaking and codebreaking powers such that the nation which first develops this master machine will have absolute dominance over all others in world affairs.

Researching centuries-old 'memory palace' forerunners of this system, NSA analyst Dr. Jaron Kwok appears to have spontaneously combusted in a hotel room not far from Hong Kong. Chinese policewoman Lu Mei-lin is brought in on the case, as is Kwok's understudy, Dr. Ben Cho. Trying to get at the truth of what actually happened to Jaron Kwok, Lu and Cho encounter a web of international intrigue involving the Chinese Ministry of State Security (Guoanbu), an alphabet-soup of turf-battling US security agencies -- including the NSA, CIA, and FBI -- as well as Chinese crime clans and Islamist revolutionaries.

Working behind these scenes is an even more shadowy group, the Tetragrammaton Project. Tetra's interests involve the future of all humanity and are far larger than issues of mere national securities or personal privacies. Opposing Tetra and its design for human history is the loose alliance of the Kitchener Foundation. Behind both of these, however, looms the most shadowy entity of all: the secret society of global intelligence operatives known only as the Instrumentality.

Lu and Cho, NSA Deputy Director Jim Brescoll, Cybernesian VR outlaws Don Sturm and Karuna Drang, Kwok's widow Cherise LeMoyne, and many more in this web of intrigue try to discover to what degree they are puppets, and to what degree they pull their own strings. Their story ranges from China to America to Italy and Israel, from Kabbalah and alchemy and sixteenth-century memory palace systems to twenty first century work in quantum mechanics, cryptology, and information theory. In the process, those examining the many faces of truth learn more about themselves, their nations, and the deeper nature of what is real and what is virtual in our world than they ever imagined.

With those ideas in mind, I set out writing a big two-stranded tale. One strand of the story takes place in 2032-2033, during the pandemic that empties the cities and wipes out more than ninety-nine percent of the human species. That strand involves events worldwide — from Los Angeles to London, Bombay to Johannesburg, Hong Kong to Seattle. The second strand, which takes place from 2065-2066, involves the quest for a true history of that vast pandemic a third of the century in the past — a quest that begins in the Bahamas then proceeds up the East Coast along the Inland Waterway, ending at last in an empty New York City. Even that, however, does not fully exhaust the locales both temporal and spatial in the book. Its earliest episodes reach forward in time as early as 1966, and extend by the thinnest of tendrils into the parallel universe chronicled in my first three novels — Lightpaths, Standing Wave, and Better Angels.

Since Empty Cities of the Full Moon takes place in a different universe from those previous books, I had much travel and research to do, particularly on prion biology, "many worlds" physics, shamanism, and what might be called "the dynamics of urban entropy" (significantly more than just the rust, vines, and weeds of ruined cities). More broad-canvas than my previous books, I still strove to make Empty Cities as weirdly consistent and consistently weird as anything I've ever written. That was why this book took over my life, full time, for two years.

Of course, all of this barely scratches the surface of Empty Cities of the Full Moon. To get a fuller flavor of Empty Cities, bookmark this site — I'll be posting a sample chapter or two, most likely in late June or early July. I'll also be touring extensively (doing readings and signings) beginning after August 15th, so check out the "Meet the Author" page too.

Research Links

Spears of God

Howard's latest book—Spears of God—is in stores and online. Check it out today.

Online Resellers:

Amazon.com