Zone 23 — The Strange Recital

Here’s one for all you dystopian fiction fans.

I don’t usually send out posts of the interviews I do via email—I just stick them in the Interviews/Press section of my Substack—but I wanted to send this one out, because it’s a lovely reading of a chapter from my dystopian novel Zone 23 by Brent Robison of The Strange Recital podcast. Brent and Tom Newton are writers in upstate New York. They have been doing The Strange Recital, “a podcast about fiction that questions the nature of reality,” for quite a while now. They are a class act.

A brief interview with me follows Brent’s reading.

You can listen to Episode 25081 here …

Episodes page: https://thestrangerecital.com/index.php/episodes/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheStrangeRecital/

Libsyn: https://thestrangerecital.libsyn.com/zone-23

Or on the YouTube …

The new Arcade Publishing edition of Zone 23 is available wherever books are sold.

“Zone 23 is a razor-sharp, painfully hilarious satire on a future society in which authoritarianism rules beneath the mask of peace. It’s full of heart, humanity, humour and riotous defiance. As a warning and provocation it sits alongside the literary sci-fi classics by Vonnegut, Bradbury and Pynchon.”—Ewan Morrison, author of For Emma

"A big, bold novel that's funny and harrowing and funny again . . . 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 of The Gift of Fear

“[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

"Zone 23 reads like one of the mind-bending compounds discovered by the infamous, legendary psychopharmacologist Alexander Shulgin -strangely, the book itself is the antidote for the very depression it induces. It’s also wildly prophetic, scary, and scabrously funny."—Bruce Wagner

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