Peter Tieryas Liu is the author of the new science fiction book, United States of Japan (Angry Robot Books), Bald New World (Perfect Edge Books) and Watering Heaven (Signal 8 Books). Bald New World was long listed for the Folio Prize 2015, listed as one of Buzzfeed’s 15 Highly Anticipated Books of 2014, and was one of the Best Books of Summer 2014 from Publisher Weekly in a star review. He has been published in journals including Electric Literature, Evergreen Review, Gargoyle, Hobart, Indiana Review, Kyoto Journal, New Letters, New Orleans Review, Toad Suck Review, and ZYZZYVA. He has also worked as a technical writer for LucasArts, the gaming division of LucasFilm.
https://tieryas.wordpress.com/
“United States of Japan is a powerful book, unsettling at times – surreal and hypnotic.
There’s a bit of Philip K. Dick in here, and Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, but Peter Tieryas
is his own voice, a talented author, somebody to keep an eye on for sure.
I loved his last book, Bald New World, and I loved this one, too.”
Richard Thomas, author of Breaker and Disintegration
United States of Japan was released by Angry Robot Books in March 2016. It has proved a big hit.
“United States of Japan mixes alt-history with pulp-history, the plausible with the fantastical, in a vision of the 1980s with the glossy sheen and rain-slick neon of vintage cyberpunk.” B&N Science Fiction & Fantasy Reviews USJ
United States of Japan is set in a gripping alternate history where the Japanese Empire rules over America with huge robots. Is resistance possible in the form of subversive video games?
Decades ago, Japan won the Second World War. Americans worship their infallible emperor, and nobody believes that Japan's conduct in the war was anything but exemplary.
Nobody, that is, except the George Washingtons, a group of rebels fighting for freedom. Their latest terrorist tactic is to distribute an illegal video game that asks players to imagine what the world might be like if the United States had won the war instead. Captain Beniko Ishimura's job is to censor video games, and he is tasked with getting to the bottom of this disturbing new development.
But Ishimura's hiding something...kind of. He's slowly been discovering that the case of the George Washingtons is more complicated than it seems, and the subversive video game's origins are even more controversial and dangerous than the censors originally suspected.
A spiritual sequel to Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle, United States of Japan carries on the legacy of Dick's famous alternate history, focusing on how Americans and Japanese deal with their guilt and troubled relationship to the past.
The book had it's Japanese release in November 2016 and it is now in it's 5th and made the Nikkei Bestseller list at #1 in its Sunday Book Review based on Junkudo. For those not as familiar, Nikkei is their biggest newspapers and the biggest financial newspaper in the world (actually owning the Financial Times).
Bald New World was released by Perfect Edge Books (us) in May 2014
"If you took the world building of Philip K. Dick, and added in the gritty reality and humor of Haruki Murakami, with a touch of Aldous Huxley (of course), you would get Bald New World." 15 Highly Anticipated Books of 2014, Buzzfeed
What if you woke up one morning and everyone in the world lost their hair? In Bald New World, that very event happens and overnight, religion, politics, and fashion undergo dramatic shifts. Nick Guan and his friend Larry Chao are a pair of eccentric filmmakers who choose to explore the existential angst of their balding world through cinema. Larry is heir to one of the most lucrative wig companies in the world. Nick is a man who’s trying to make sense of the tatters of his American Dream. Taking place throughout China and America, the pair set off on a series of misadventures involving North Korean spies, veterans of an African War, and digital cricket fighters. Their journey leads them to discover some of the darkest secrets behind wig-making and hair in a hairless world.
BEST SUMMER BOOKS 2014~Publishers Weekly
FOLIO PRIZE 2015 longlist.
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Watering Heaven was published in 2012, Peter's first novel.
"Exuberant.Wildly inventive.Grungy with global resonance for the 21st century.This debut collection of fiction rides bareback over the metaphysical divide of Asia and the USA. An astonishing energy prevails. This is definitely a writer to watch." -Xu Xi, Access
What would you do if you found out your girlfriend laid an egg every time she had sex? Who would you be if you were invited to a party in Beijing but had to make up a brand-new identity for six weeks? Peter Tieryas Liu’s Watering Heaven is a travelogue of and requiem for the American dream in all its bizarre manifestations and a surreal, fantastic journey through the streets, alleys, and airports of China. Whether it’s a monk who uses acupuncture needles to help him fly or a city filled with rats about to be exterminated so that the mayor can win his reelection bid, be prepared to laugh, swoon, and shudder at the answers Liu offers in this provocative debut collection.
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