BOOK NEWS JAN 20: ANDROID KARENINA & KYLIE CHAN

Source: io9

TOLSTOY GOES STEAMPUNK IN ‘ANDROID KARENINA’

The latest scifi/lit mashup to emerge from Quirk Books, publishers of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, is a silly re-imagining of the famously humorless novel Anna Karenina. It’s called Android Karenina, and the publisher promises what sound like steampunk cylons.

According to the UK Guardian:

Just like the original Anna Karenina, the mash-up version will follow the relationships of Anna and Vronsky, and Levin and Kitty, but rather than 19th-century Russia, these characters live “in a steampunk-inspired world of robotic butlers, clumsy automata, and rudimentary mechanical devices”. “When these copper-plated machines begin to revolt against their human masters, our characters must fight back using state-of-the-art 19th-century technology – and a sleek new model of ultra-human cyborgs like nothing the world has ever seen”.

Read more here

Source: straitstimes

BLENDING EAST WITH WEST

The first time I picked up one of Kylie Chan’s books, I have to admit that I was a little bit jealous. Chan’s fantasy stories that mix ancient Chinese myths and legends, gods and demons with modern society were exactly the type of themes that I’d once thought of writing about.

So, while I was a bit disappointed that it had already been done, I was even more excited to have something to read that I knew I’d be both interested in and would understand.

Chan’s first trilogy – White Tiger, Red Phoenix and Blue Dragon which made up Dark Heavens – followed the life of an ordinary Australian young woman living in Hong Kong and working as a nanny to a mixed-race child whose father seemed to be an ordinary Chinese businessman.

The nanny, Emma, eventually discovers that her new boss is not only not ordinary, he’s not even human. John Chen is in fact is a 3000 year old Chinese god; the god of martial arts.

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Will you be reading ‘Android Karenina’?  Have you read Kylie Chan’s first trilogy…tell us about it.