Hey wait…1 star review on Nook???? They must think 1 means “best”… like #1

….but if you just want a nice DRM-Free pdf to download IMMEDIATELY then click right here–> https://gumroad.com/l/pDB

In Horne’s cunning for weaving social commentary into his plot…we see a contemporary beat writer at work, through brief, stark observations (on the cold logic of the free market, for instance) and broad sweeping story arcs (the beauty and slavery of Earth, the origin of blackwarps and so on) that add depth and intelligence without ruining the sense of fantasy and adventure.

‘Automatic Assassin’ has everything: black humour, death, un-death, resurrection, philosophy, technology – even a tiny hint of sex. It is a voyage of fun and repulsion, egomania and altruism… and so many other contradictions that you will disembark knowing that you love Xolo whilst never really understanding why. – beatentrackpublishing.com

Extremely funny and wild and poetic science fiction story. Lots of wit, interesting characters, wild locales, fantastic imagery, using and abusing (in the best way possible) old and tried science fiction clichees, while coming up with a lot of new ones. Like the main character’s brain bomb, I couldn’t help fall a little in love with the character and the story and the hilariously difficult circumstances he constantly finds himself in, and which he somehow manages to get himself out of. – Berit Ellingsen, Author of The Empty City

This book is a wildly inventive bed-time story told by a savvy poet to a precocious space-monkey.

It’s got fast-plot adventure, whimsy and outright piss-taking shot through with gorgeous observations and fabulous horrordreams of future. It’s a cool ride with an unnerving end.

Marc Horne delivers hilariously cheeky sentences, like this:

‘The panties of victory started to ride up over the waistband of retreat’

and casually and persistently drops beauties, like this:

‘Enormous bloated seconds passed like whales.’

Automatic Assassin is Far Out – ”Outside (the outside of the inside of the underside of the real side) …” - Penny Goring, author of The Zoom Zoom

A cyberpunk space opera about Xolo, a man who replaced his conscience with a machine.
A routine assassination on a synthetic planet gets complicated when Xolo stupidly rescues some kids, gets a bomb in his head (that falls in love with him) and then winds up on the world of kings, brainslaves and electric zombies known as ‘Earth,’ where he is mistaken for a cosmic messiah.

So tell your friends, and if you want a review copy then let me know or contact zizekpress@gmail.com if you don’t have my contact info.

I’m just doing some last minute tinkering now. It;s a bit of a change of direction. I wanted to go for an over-the-top blockbuster feel with layers of literary special effects and weird set pieces. I literally have no idea how people are going to react to it, and that is fun.

From the author of This Unhappy Planet and cult classic Tokyo Zero comes a selection of short fiction, satire and poetry to unsettle then soothe your brain.

Punchy encounters with memorable people seeing odd things await you. Meet pithy French film critics, born again management gurus, slum tourists, girls with teardrop tattoos and what have you.

(13 chapters, plus an exclusive preview of Horne’s next novel)

http://www.amazon.com/The-Collected-Shortness-ebook/dp/B0050KEHDG

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Collected-Shortness-ebook/dp/B0050KEHDG

Kindle can now be read on Kindles, iPhones, Androids etc. so I hope this will be convenient for all. I’m not using any DRM and the books are still under a Creative Commons license.

TOKYO ZERO

One man goes to Tokyo to end the world. It goes fairly well.

“lyrically jarring“, “wildly imaginative“, “so good that, if you haven’t read it, you may in fact be squandering your literacy.”

US  http://amzn.to/aY2UNj UK http://amzn.to/hUfykH (no DRM)

THIS UNHAPPY PLANET

A Spiritual Fitness Club seemed like a great way to make money, but reality is not always for sale.

“darkly, subtly funny“,“characters imbued with depth and shading”

US  http://amzn.to/b6gjkf UK http://amzn.to/eg8D76 (no DRM)

[a sketch of something I saw tonight]

It’s the tale of four friends in California who take it in turns to be crazy at the end of the ’00s.

Here is a chunk I enjoyed writing

It’s interesting to watch your wife. Getting a little notebook, furtively capturing phrases, doing little sketches of her. Combing through her web-browsing history.

Jack had had a sense of this before when he had noticed how much pleasure he took in catching sight of Allie from afar: like when they were going to meet outside a store or whatever and he would see her in the crowd before she saw him. Her big sunglasses, floppy tied-up hair, swan neck, the way she carried her handbag low like Peter Hook’s bass. It was enchanting: a mix of flying over your own house in a plane and of remembering the exciting early unfamiliar days of a relationship. Cynically, also, she was not talking.

This was different, though. She was a case study and he was an anthropologist. That could be sexy too. A mud hut, the Nile Delta. She comes from the river… still wet, the drips glistened on her tribal markings.

Or, she’s driving the car and a homeless guy is at the light and instead of wasting a five on him like she used to, she instead looks in his eyes for a good ten seconds and says, “You need to figure out what you really want. God bless.”

Hmm. Hoboes are just not sexy… unless possibly if you’re a serial killer or something.

Chapter 1

This book got started in 2001. I was a on a plane from London to New York and I read “The Tesseract” by Alex Garland. It seemed to me that it presented a good formula to help me write a novel, previous attempts having turned into a meandering stream-of-consciousness/free-verse. I would take all of the street-level detail that I had picked up living in the sort-of rough part of Tokyo and bundle it with a fast-paced, pulp novel plot. I would then sprinkle with a hint of anti-realism, for my own fun, and it would all turn out great.

Eventually I sat down to write, with an idea of the basic theme which was (SPOILERZZZZ (just kidding)) about how the most barbaric acts of mankind come from people who think that they have been authorized, rather than from rebels and criminals. I also wanted to focus on a fictionalization of the Aum Shinrikyo Sarin Gas attacks on Tokyo, which happened during my stay there. I thought there was a lot of potential in the story of the subculture that gave rise to all of that.

So I decided on the ending, and decided to write that first to give me a goal to write towards. Other than that I had decided to write the whole thing in one draft, with no going back the next day for any rewrites. It’s the only way I could write at that time… like the end of the world!

Before I get into chapter 1, a note on the title. For the latter half of the writing this had the ‘joke’ title of ‘My Tokyo Death Cult’ By the time I got to the end it had grown on me so I published the book with that title as a Creative Commons text. The high traffic blog BoingBoing posted on it and I got a lot of traffic for a week or two. But then I went off the title. The reason being that people just don’t like saying “my tokyo death cult.” So yes, I am a sell out there… I listened to the people. Well, I didn’t like MTDC much as a title either… it was too much in the voice of the main narrator and I wanted something a little more ‘interpretable’. Hence ‘Tokyo Zero’. I kept MTDC as the subtitle

So chapter 1. It’s one of the shortest chapters. It’s set in Tokyo’s largest Train Station, which never ceased to be a labyrinth for me.

I wanted to create a very rushed tone, but at the same time prepare the reader for the fact that this was a novel that was going to head off at tangents at will. I’m not saying it Tristram Shandy or anything, but I was pretty sure that I was not going to go from A to B directly. So the ‘chase sequence’ includes hints of the near future, childhood, sci-fi far future and a timeless ocean full of large animals.

I think the third paragraph is almost unreadable. It seems like a translation of some kind of language that is written only on Upwords boards. Let’s pretend it is meant to reflect the confusion of the narrator’s mindset, shall we.

About the narrator. He is nameless throughout: is that pretentious?  Actually, you can figure out his surname at some point… it’s Blake.

I was surprised to find the father figure pop up in this chapter already. I think I had a vague idea that the narrator was kind or ‘programmed’ by his father, but it was only after writing this chapter that I realized it had to be a major point. It makes sense in retrospect: programming by parents, and the creation of house rules is the template for tribalism and xenophobia, which I get into a bit later.

One word on Takeshi Honda who appears here. He is based on a real guy I used to know, a Jietai (Self Defense Force) man who was the kind of Japanese guy who probably actually does chop through wooden blocks with his hand. Also extremely affable. But if you mix in a healthy dose of Yukio Mishima, an obsession of mine at the time I was in Japan, you end up with the Takeshi Honda in ‘Tokyo Zero’

Chapter 2

As you can see at the start of this chapter I have a kind of beginning anxiety. Later on you’ll see I also have three versions of the middle chapter. But the ending is very solid and conventional.

It’s fairly well known that the end of story is an arbitrary act of censorship, but I’m still in Tristram Shandy territory here since the thrust of the novel is about how one man acts very differently than most other men do… So why is that…. where did he diverge?

The lead character Blake has some ideas and he sketches them out here. But he and I both know that the real starting point is when he gets off the plane in Japan.

Nostalgia is the strongest emotion in this chapter. Here it’s triggered by the move to Japan, but I also wanted to show how he gets nostalgia even for the Tokyo Airport. Nostalgia has something of a restricted definition in our culture, something old-timers indulge in. In this book Blake goes through a number of irreversible transitions, and he feels nostalgia each time. In his case though, it acts to increase his emotional distance from the real world. He values memories and stories as much as physical reality.

I got a lot of negative feedback on my unrealistic depiction of Narita Airport. You have to remember that this is the year 2000, and in fact is more set in the mid-90s, in terms of the fact that it is a retelling of the 1995 Aum terror attacks. There was no MickeyDs. And it was very brown.

Why did I move it to 2000 you might ask? 2000 as absolutely arbitrary symbol of the transition from past to future had great appeal to me. Also, as someone who grew up reading the sci-fi comic 2000 a.d., the irony of writing a period piece set in 2000 was too sweet.

The title Tokyo Zero is at least partly derived from 2000 being 00

Chapter 3

The train ride from the airport is one that I made many times during my time in Tokyo. I decided not to just cut to having our hero in the middle of Tokyo because there is something special about entering Tokyo by train. I tried to capture it in this chapter: it something about the way that the transition from rice fields to full-on metropolis is so seamless. Tokyo is an official ‘character’ in this book, in that a lot of time is spent studying the way people move around it, hide in it etc. A mega city is interesting to me in that it is so vast that you could imagine coincidences never happening, but so dense and interconnected that they are practically inevitable.

There are a number of beautiful concrete temples and castles in Japan. I have never been on a tour of a demolished castle like in Europe. They generally fix them up. It seems to follow the principal of wabi-sabi, where you let things get a bit shabby but no more than that.

The windmill is real. I have no idea if it is a fake monument or if Japanese farming uses windmills extensively. It’s the only one I have ever seen, though.

The movie poster is based on the hand painted Japanese movie posters that are dying out these days. Perhaps because the train platform I am writing about here was just too close to the poster, but also because of the different way that western facial features are captured in these works, I could often not quite figure out who I was looking at. As for the ridiculous movie name… I think that was real. One thing that was definitely real was a geriatric lady on the train with an English language t-shirt reading “lovers need rubbers”

A final note for train enthusiasts. You are right to note that you can’t take the Keisei Line from Narita Airport to Kanamachi. He mishears the announcement. He is in fact in Takasago.

Chapter 4

Koiwa is a bit of a nowhere part of Tokyo. It is kind of part of the “shitamachi” old town, but grimy and with better train service. Back in the 90s it was well known for large numbers of Korean and Iranian immigrants. It was surprisingly cosmopolitan.

If you plan on going on a tour to re-enact this chapter, I made you a google map. http://bit.ly/5Sc6oS

Pocari Sweat is an easy target for foreigners going for “Engrish” laughs. In my defense, I still drink it to this day [when the Pocaris are in season.]

Chapter5

After the Aum Shinrikyo attacks on Tokyo [which hit a station I frequently passed through] [but I was in South Korea at the time] [some people wouldn’t add that last bit] the faces of 5 suspects were plastered everywhere in Tokyo. There were even life size figurines of them in one station. They were depicted with all kinds of wild alternative hairstyles. After a while I began to feel like I knew them as well as The Beatles.

Chapter6

There is not a lot of pure autobiography in this book, but this chapter is basically true to life except my dad just said “hmm.”

Chapter7

Hmm… maybe there is more autobiography in this book than I thought. I did have an interview with an eccentric property developer that was just like this, only it was to be his English tutor. Of course, there was no torture chamber.

Chapter8

This chapter is set in the famous Takeshita Dori in Tokyo which is where you see photos of punks, tanned girls etc. What can I say except that anyone who says “Takeshita is so fake these days” is just totally missing the point.

Chapter9

The sudden flash-forward is one of my favorite literary techniques, but I am hard pushed to remember where I have picked it up from. Maybe Martin Amis? More likely some obscure comic book. Have you ever read Martin Amis’ book about Space Invaders?

www.martinamisweb.com/commentary_files/ma_space_invaders.pdf

Later on in the book, I normalize this flash-forward by making it a character’s dream. Keep an eye out for that. Almost all of my anti-realist touches get normalized like that. Perhaps that is a little lame.

Chapter10

Back to Judge Dredd, I was always fascinated by the idea they had of future mega-cities where there were these towerblocks that people never left because they contained everything a future human would need. I don’t know if Wagner and Grant read Ballard, or vice versa, but it stuck with me. In Tokyo I found the sprouts of this future. I worked in a building with a church on the third floor, a school on the 7^th floor and a bar in the basement.

In America, we find this kind of thing in a strip mall but it is less impressive on the horizontal axis.

Chapter11

This stream of the novel is driven by 2 parallel romanticized visions of middle-class English girls and monochrome mini-computers which have been forced to intersect.

Chapter12

So: the Yakuza! I had several run ins with them while I was in Japan. The first was at a hot spring, trying to ignore a naked middle-aged man with fully inked tattoos having his hair brushed by three young men with near-identical but paint-by-numbers-book pictures on their backs.

Chapter13

I lived in a converted office building such as the one described in this book. Imagine the things you hear at work, like your neighbor slurping coffee in his cube. Then imagine if you actually lived in those cubes all day. Every day.

Also our shower was in the kitchen, and there really was a tele-sex-club sign over the front door.

Chapter14

Pure fiction.

Chapter15

This chapter is like my own childhood if I had been really into J G Ballard. He is a massive influence on my thinking, but not my writing because I like his restraint.

Chapter16

If everyone knows that new technologies are driven by pornography, surely someone smart somewhere is exploiting that? If you start thinking like that, the Twitter feeds you get about ‘Britny’ take on a weird flavor.

Chapter17

So if “Tokyo” is not much like Tokyo, then Shibuya definitely is. I used to come to Shibuya to buy CDs a lot, but after a while I began to suspect I was really coming to participate in the massive pedestrian flows. It can be lonely living in the big city, after all.

Chapter18

Although the Ko Samsara character is heavily inspired by Shoko Asahara, mastermind of the 1995 Sarin attacks, there is a big dash of Kim Jong Il of North Korea in there too. I was struck by the way both used ‘anime’ and by Kim’s Lone Ranger obsession.

http://bit.ly/5CaJxl

Chapter19

I have few supernatural beliefs, but am open to idea that information slips sideways between universes.

Chapter20

Have you ever been to a party on a boat? Have you noticed the weird atmosphere of abandon, even if you are only a dozen feet from dry land. That is the theme of this book in a nutshell.

Unless I messed up, everyone does speak in haiku in this chapter.

Chapter21

Just as I was wrapping up this book, I read “Les Particules élémentaires” by Michel Houellebecq and he immediately became one of my favorite novelists. Martin Amis said “You write the book you want to read. That’s my rule.” Unfortunately, Houellebecq wrote the book I wanted to read. But, mine has more car chases. He also uses the extreme Flash Forward, but I did it before I read him. How cool is that?

Chapter22

I was always puzzled by why the terrorist hit the most obscure little subway station in Kasumagaseki. Why not go really big and hit Shinjuku? My terrorists would not make the same mistake! My wife may be the source of this thinking. She often says things like “Why don’t terrorist just machine-gun this shopping mall?” not because she hates shopping malls, but because she loves efficiency.

Chapter23

Diana did die while I was in Japan, and I did indeed receive massive sympathy from working class Japanese people. I did indeed get a massive discount on … I think it was actually garlic but I changed it to onions in the book for comic effect. Onions are funnier. When I left England, Oasis were just breaking and the Tories where still in power. So I can never go back.

Chapter24

This all really happened to me, but in a scaled down sense. A man did come in to our apartment looking for weird sex stuff. Which I never understood, since if this was a tele-sex-club, why would he be coming here in person?

I wrote this book some years ago, but I have just now realized that the terrorists may be one-for-one analogs for the ‘gaijin’ people I lived with at that time. Like the Wizard of Oz has the black and white and color versions of people.

Chapter25

The Avon school of English is a diabolical reimagining of my first employers in Japan: Nova. They scooped up anyone with a degree and a degree of normality. They may have set back the cause of Japanese/Western relations as much as any drunken marine in Okinawa. They brilliantly figured out how to atomize and commoditize education. It was not sustainable and depended upon low class Japanese people having disposable income: when the economy went down was bound to fail.

Chapter26

Who would have thought, when I wrote this, that the meaning of torture would become controversial in the West?

The idea of this chapter was about how when you are told you are in the right, or even better if there is a sign on the wall, you will justify anything.

Chapter27

I don’t know if Repo’s is still open but if it is… Go There!

Chapter28

Occasionally, I will get challenged that Koiwa is less sleazy than I portray it. I dispute that. If you see an unshaven Phillipina transsexual in your grocery store, and then glorious at work at night in the neon time then you are in a cool sleazy time.

Chapter29

I love this chapter! Is that vain? I think because I had never read a car chase before but managed to pull of a literary car chase. I think!

Chapter30

A concussion hallucination

Chapter31

I decided to do a recap here, and I think it helped me get the momentum to finish the book at speed. Writing the novel made me realize how much a book is the novelist in dialog with himself, engaging in rhetorical skirmishes between the narrative urge and the lazy clumsy hand.

Chapter32

Suddenly it is a love story. And the novel starts to go fast and it gets finished.

Chapter33

The plot!

Chapter34

If I had to cut one chapter it would be this except that the BBC quote is a real one about Keizo Obuchi and I can’t find it online so I need to keep it alive.

Chapter35

A tiny island with 120 million people on it, and a lot of that island is mountains even, can still have isolated villages where cults do weird things.

Chapter36

The walk with Borges was a real moment in the life of young Marc Horne: one of the best.

Chapter37

I did not go to Roppongi much, which is where foreign folk go for night-clubbing, I went there once totally drunk and it was magic like this and I even found a great falafel street stand. I ended up there sober playing a floppy game of darts one time too.

Chapter38

Miscellaneous real fragments of great drinks I have had. The bar in question can be found in Düsseldorf, though, not Tokyo.

Chapter39

I needed to float the idea that my real enemy in this book is Blake, not the Japanese terrorists.

Chapter40

Ok… so this is the big coincidence. But seriously, I had so many coincidences like this in the big Asian cities that I had to capture that. There are flows and currents in these places that suck most of us along so subtly that we actually think we are free.

See also the anthropic principle and Samsara’s speech in the previous chapter.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle

So, now… 40 chapters in… you are reading a science fiction novel. How does that feel?

Chapter41

My dad died shortly after I wrote this chapter. But he bore very little resemblance to the father character in this book.

Chapter42

I feel like Testuo the yakuza gets a raw deal in this chapter. I have a half written short story about what happened to him in his life that I might finish one day. Let’s just say that this novel released antibodies to destroy him, but in his own short story he gets a happy ending.

Chapter43

I really enjoyed writing this chapter. I don’t know if that matters to the reader, but it was like the characters were breaking out of the trap I had them in and saying goodbye.

Chapter44-46

The payoff. The final line is based on what I remember from reading the end of Crime and Punishment a long time ago. That and the end of “À la recherche du temps perdu” are two ecstatic reading experiences of mine. Which is to say that I got an emotional surge reading them, which has persisted even though my memories of the words has strongly faded. DISCLAIMER: I am not comparing this book to Proust and Dostoevsky! Other than that they are all made of words, there is no resemblance.