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JOHN BIRMINGHAM ON WITHOUT WARNING, HIS NEW SF THRILLER

About twenty years ago I was a bona fide student radical. Long hair. B.O. Obnoxious sense of self-righteousness. The whole deal. But I got over it. Partly because of my fellow student radicals who were, well, wankers.

I remember one in particular. An Engish Lit postgrad and one of the craziest Far Left lentil-eatin' goons I ever met. We got into this furious argument one day. Or rather he did. I just stood there smiling at him.

It was all about America. How wrong America was. How evil America was. How much better the world would be if America disappeared.

By the time he got to that last point he'd worked himself into a slavering rage against all things American and I vividly recall him screaming at me, “We'd all be a lot better off if we woke up and they were gone. JUST GONE!”

I thought, “Oh, you are such an idiot... But what a great idea for a book!”

And so you have Without Warning. A cautionary tale based on the old Chinese proverb. Be careful what you wish for, you might just get it.

Praise for Without Warning:

“Brilliant, nail-biting, thoughtful, and excruciatingly pertinent to our times . . . simply a tour de force, a true classic in the making.”
—James Rollins, bestselling author of The Last Oracle

“I cannot remember the last time I’ve finished a book in one sitting. . . The most realistic apocryphal novel I’ve ever read.”
—John Ringo, bestselling author of The Last Centurion

In Kuwait, American forces are stacked up, locked and loaded for the invasion of Iraq. In Paris, a covert agent, a woman who inhabits a twilight of lies and death, is close to cracking a terrorist cell. And just north of the equator, a forty-foot wood-hulled sailboat, manned by a drug runner, a pirate, and two gun-slinging beauties, is witness to the unspeakable. In one instant, all around the world, for politicians and peasants, from Gaza to Geneva, things will never be the same. A wave of inexplicable energy has slammed into the continental United States.

America, as we know it, is gone.

From a slick Texas lawyer who happens to be in the right place at the right time to a hard-working city engineer in Seattle who becomes his terrified city’s only hope, from the cancer-stricken secret agent to a drug runner off the Mexican coast and a U.S. general in Cuba, Without Warning tells a fast, furious story of survival, violence, and a new, soul-shattering reality. The first in an epic trilogy that will leave readers breathless and astounded, Without Warning offers a world without its policeman, its Great Satan, or its savior—as an unknowable future struggles to be born.

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In the nineteenth century, Dr. Victor Frankenstein brought his notorious creation to life, but a horrible turn of events forced him to abandon it and slip away from the public eye. Two centuries later, a serial killer is on the loose in New Orleans, gruesomely salvaging body parts from each of his victims, as if trying to assemble a perfect human being.

Detective Carson O’Connor is cool, cynical, and every bit as tough as she looks. Her partner, Michael Maddison, would back her up all the way to Hell itself–and that just may be where their new case leads. For as they investigate the strange killings, O’Connor and Madison find themselves drawn into a weird underworld of deception and secrets where a man named Victor Helios has created an entire race of perfectly engineered people who are meant to take humankind’s place one day. But something is happening to some of Helios’s creations, and it may be that this bizarre serial killer is the least of the detectives’ worries.

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Throughout the galaxy, a captured Jedi is a dead Jedi, even in Coruscant’s most foul subterranean slums, where Jedi Knight Jax Pavan champions the causes of the oppressed with the help of hard-nosed reporter Den Dhur and the wisecracking droid I-5YQ. But Jax is also involved in another struggle–to unlock the secrets of his father’s death and his own past.

While Jax believes that I-5YQ holds some of those answers, he never imagines that the truth could be shocking enough to catapult him to the frontlines of a plot to kill Emperor Palpatine. Worse yet, Darth Vader’s relentless search for Jax is about to end . . . in triumph. The future looming over the valiant Jedi and his staunch pals promises to be dark and brief, because there’s no secret whatsoever about the harshest truth of all: Few indeed are those who tangle with Darth Vader . . . and live to tell the tale.

For Ky, it’s not just about liberating the star systems subjugated by Turek and defending the rest of the galaxy’s freedom. There’s also a score to be settled and payback to be meted out for the obliteration of the Vatta Transport dynasty . . . and the slaughter of Ky’s family. But the enemy have their own escalation efforts under way—including the placement of covert agents among the allies with whom Ky and the surviving Vattas are collaborating in the war effort. And when a spy ring linked to a wealthy businessman is exposed, a cracked pirate code reveals a galaxywide conspiracy fueling the proliferation of Turek’s warship fleet.

Matching the invaders’ swelling firepower will mean marshaling an armada of battle-ready ships for Ky to lead into combat. But a violent skirmish leaves Ky reeling—and presumed dead by her enemies. Now, as Turek readies an all-out attack on the Nexus system—a key conquest that could seal the rest of the galaxy’s doom—Ky must rally to the challenge, draw upon every last reserve of her strategic skills, and reach deep if she is to tear from the ashes of tragedy her most decisive victory.

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The Briar King is dead, and the world itself follows him to ruin. Aspar White, wounded and tired, must embark on one last quest to save the forest and the people he loves, but he has little hope of success. Anne Dare at last sits on the throne of Crotheny, but for how long? The Church, now led by the corrupt and powerful Marché Hespero, has declared a holy war against her, giving the king of Hansa the pretext he needs to unleash his vast might on the young queen and her unready army.

But Hansa is the least of Anne’s worries. The Hellrune, war seer of Hansa, strikes at her through vision and prophecy. The Kept—last of the elder Skasloi lords—weaves his own dark webs. Anne’s teacher and ally in the sedos world might also be her worst enemy, and Anne’s own mounting strength compels her toward madness. Surviving these dangers and mastering her eldritch abilities are merely prelude to the real struggle. There are many—some with power matching or even exceeding Anne’s own—who are willing to kill in order to seize control. For whoever sits upon the throne will have the ultimate command to bring about the world’s salvation—or its apocalypse.

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Deposed by a vicious usurper, a young emperor flees with his court to the small island of Taishu. There, with a dwindling army, a manipulative mother, and a resentful population–and his only friend a local fishergirl he takes as a concubine–he prepares for his last stand. In the mountains of Taishu, a young miner finds a huge piece of jade, the potent mineral whose ingestion can gift the emperor with superhuman attributes. Setting out to deliver the stone to the embattled emperor, Yu Shan finds himself changing into something more than human, something forbidden.

Meanwhile, a great dragon lies beneath the strait that separates Taishu from the mainland, bound by chains that must be constantly renewed by the magic of a community of monks. When the monks are slaughtered by a willful pirate captain, a maimed slave assumes the terrible burden of keeping the dragon subdued. If he should fail, if she should rise free, the result will be slaughter on an unimaginable scale. Now, the prisoner beneath the sea and the men and women above it will shatter old bonds of loyalty and forge a destiny from the ruins of empire.