More Good News

I’ve got some good news and some good news.

The first bit of good news is, a brand new edition of ZONE 23, the satirical dystopian novel I self-published in 2017, will be published in July of 2025 by Arcade Publishing.

Begun by Arcade founders Richard and Jeannette Seaver, now an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing, Arcade has published literary giants such as Samuel Beckett, Leo Tolstoy, Octavio Paz, and E. M. Cioran alongside newer voices like Andreï Makine and Ismail Kadare. In 2012, Chinese novelist and Arcade author Mo Yan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. They also publish of a lot of Bruce Wagner’s novels, including the one that got cancelled by his previous publisher because a character was named “Fat Joan.” Seriously, that actually happened.

Please note Arcade Publishing’s slogan (below), which has been my unofficial slogan, and business model, for over thirty years.

I polished ZONE 23 for the new edition, and trimmed a little fat here and there, but it is basically the same 500-page impossible-to-read-on-your-phone monster. Here’s the short description (I couldn’t resist highlighting part of it) …

“A darkly comic dystopian satire about being human, all-too-human, featuring two of the most endearing Anti-Social anti-heroes that ever rebelled against the forces of Normality. Set in the post-catastrophic future, in a peaceful, prosperous, corporate-controlled society where all dissent and non-conformity has been pathologized, and the human race is being genetically corrected in order to establish everlasting peace on Earth, ZONE 23 is a hilarious, heartbreaking affirmation of the anarchic human spirit, and a defiant departure from the norms of both the genre sci-fi and literary novel.”

And here’s an early blurb …

“A big, bold novel that’s funny and harrowing and funny again. C. J. Hopkins paints an unflinching portrait of a genetically-modified, fact-checked, sensitivity-edited, corporate-controlled future that feels all too familiar – because we’re living in it.” — Gavin de Becker, bestselling author The Gift of Fear

And an excerpt from a review …

“[A] witty, nasty, erudite, Pynchonesque narrative, full of fleshed-out sleazy characters and a hyper-detailed alternative world ... ZONE 23 has a place on a list of several classic dystopian novels that have taken on similar themes. ”
— V. N. Alexander, Dactyl Review

There will be more blurbs and promotion to come as the release date approaches, so I’ll try to keep the rest of this short.

I’m extremely grateful to Arcade Publishing for publishing this new edition of ZONE 23, and to Tony Lyons and the team at Skyhorse Publishing, which will be publishing my latest collection of essays in April. I wrote a column a couple years back about the “sensitivity editors” employed by the big five publishers, and the generally suffocating atmosphere that pervades most of the book publishing industry these days, and I will revisit that topic soon. For now, I just want to say thank you to Tony and his team for having the courage to do what they do. Courage is in rather short supply currently, as I’m pretty sure you’ve noticed.

Oh, and the other bit of good news is for those of you who bought the original edition of ZONE 23, and who still own a copy. That old edition is now officially “out of print,” and so, with any luck, you are now in possession of a collector’s item. You might want to hang onto it.

Even if you do own that potential collector’s item, I’m hoping you’ll want to purchase this new Arcade edition to go along with it. Arcade hired my partner in thoughtcrime Anthony Freda to design the new cover art (which I thought was rather classy on their part), so there’s that. Also, if you’d like to help me throw a little monkey wrench into the gears of the literary establishment and tweak the noses of the “sensitivity editing community,” here’s an opportunity to do that. The more copies of this book get sold, the harder it will be to ignore, which, given the nature and style of the novel, and my new notoriety as an official “hate criminal,” the literary establishment will want to do.

OK, that’s it for good news at the moment. I’ll let you get back to watching … well, to watching the corporate-controlled, genetically-modified future depicted in ZONE 23 being ushered into existence right before our eyes.

Again, I apologize for that. I really didn’t think they were going to use my novel as a blueprint, or at least not so soon.

ZONE 23 is available for pre-order now from most fine booksellers.

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