GOLDEN STATE, my latest novel, comes out on Jan. 22…

…but you can preorder it today! (Scroll down for a FUN PREORDER CONTEST)

GOLDEN STATE is a mystery novel about the dissolution of objective reality, set in a place that is like California but not exactly California; a place where lying is against the law; a place where the maintenance of mutually understood and accepted reality is the paramount objective of political and civil life.

Our hero is Laszlo Ratesic, an agent of the Speculative Service, the elite agency with special license to bend the truth when necessary to solve crimes.

***

“GOLDEN STATE is a prescient, devastating commentary on humanity’s disintegrating attachment to reality and truth, expertly told through the prism of a police-procedural, dystopian nightmare. Winters has written a 1984 for the 21st century. Not just a thrilling book, but an important one.”—Blake Crouch, author of Dark Matter

“A perfectly poised ontological-thriller-comedy-dystopian-allegorical-page-turner, yet with tenderly real characters in its chewy center, this turned out to be just the thing I was looking for.”—Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn

“Not many writers would take on Orwell, Ray Bradbury, the nature of truth, and the current administration all at a blow. Big shoes to fill–and they fit Ben H. Winters just fine. Golden State grabs notions of disinformation and literalism and brilliantly turns them on their head to see what falls from their pockets.” —James Sallis, author of Drive

“Another fine novel from a writer whose imagination knows no bounds.”—Booklist

ALSO ON JAN 22, 

All three books in the Last Policeman trilogy are being reissued, with gorgeous new covers like this one:

I’m going to GIVE AWAY the complete set — all three Policeman books with the cool covers, all signed by the author (i.e., me.). To win the signed set of Last Policeman books, all you have to do is preorder GOLDEN STATE. Any time between now and January 21, order the book online or at a bookstore, and email me at winters3000@gmail.com with whatever proof of purchase or confirmation you get. (I’ll totally accept a note from your favorite local bookseller if a pre-issued receipt is not available).

I’ll pick a winner at random on Jan. 22 and send you three signed books!

I am so grateful to everyone who has read my work over the years, and I hope you dig this one, too.

— Ben

THREE CHANCES TO HEAR ME READ FROM GOLDEN STATE

2/2/2019, 2pm, Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego

2/5/2019, 7pm, Poisoned Pen in Scottsdale, Arizona

2/6/2019, 6:30pm, Diesel Books in West Los Angeles

This is the paperback edition of Underground Airlines, which  came to my house today and which can be in your house, if you’re interested, on July 18.

hot off the presses, currently on my floor

There is generally about a year between the publication of a book and the arrival of the softcover, and for any work that deals with political or other time-sensitive themes, one only hopes that you have not been mooted by subsequent events.

For Underground Airlines, the themes and ideas have, tragically, only become more relevant. My novel, as I’ve written elsewhere, was an attempt to dramatize the ways that the legacy of American slavery still informs our lives today; how we are still living with this brutal inheritance.

This is not a truth that has changed since I wrote the book. 

With black Americans still routinely dying at the hands of police, and with those police still routinely escaping consequence; with Jeff Sessions at the head of the Justice Department, rolling back civil rights legislation and ramping up the racist “war on crime”, it is clear we are in a period of retrenchment, not progress.

I said when the book came out that it was “an alternate history that wasn’t alternate enough.” Now, sadly, a year out from publication, that is even truer than it was.

So, anyway—though obviously I would love it if everyone would go out and buy the book, I thought I would use this space and time to highlight some institutions, related to the novel’s themes, worthy of continued attention and support. 

• The Movement for Black Lives  is an umbrella group, comprising a wide range of organizations fighting for equality and justice for black Americans. 

• The premise of the novel, that race-based chattel slavery remains a part of American life in the modern day, is intended to be shocking—but there are literally, right now, in reality, nearly 46 million people in various forms of enslavement  around the globe. An organization that works on this issue all over the world is called Free the Slaves; in the United States, a useful resource is End Slavery Now.

• At publication I got some shit on the internet for being a white man writing a novel about slavery with a black narrator—especially after a NYT profile called me “fearless” for doing so. The silver lining, for me, was that I ended up having a lot of thoughtful conversations with a lot of very smart people, many of whom pointed to the work of We Need Diverse Books, addressing systemic racism in the publishing industry. 

• Speaking of equality in publishing, read great books by black authors.

• Finally, crucially, give to the Democratic party. Support your local progressive candidates. And look, I know, we liberals aren’t perfect either, and ending the Trump era will not usher us into the utopian future we deserve, but it sure will be a step in the right direction.

Anyone who has read Underground Airlines and wants more elucidation of the book’s prime underlying thesis — that the institutions and attitudes formed during the long years of American slavery still inform our treatment of black citizens (to often brutal and deadly effect) — should read this article, by Jamelle Bouie in Slate.

“Before the Civil War, Southern whites held a pathological fear of slave revolts, despite lauding slavery as a ‘positive good.’,” he writes. “That fear led slaveholding states to create patrols, made up of white men in the community, who would enforce slave codes, with legal authority to capture runaways, interrogate enslaved people, and punish them if necessary. Scholars see these slave patrols as one forerunner to modern police departments…”

You should read the whole thing.

Where we come from is who we are; what we become is up to us.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/06/why_fear_was_a_viable_defense_for_killing_philando_castile.html

Underground Airlines was nominated for the

2017 Chautauqua Prize ,

the Thriller Award from the International Thriller Writers,

the 2017 Southern Book Prize from the Southern Independent Booksellers Association (in the “thriller” category),

and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel of the Year (where other finalists include Nisi Shawl’s Everfair and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, both of which I can heartily recommend).

***

The below is an edited version of a Q&A between myself and a group of high school students in Katy, Texas:

Was [SPOILER REDACTED] kept a secret intentionally (planned from the beginning), or did the story develop in such a way that his death made sense?

It was always my intention, once I knew [SPOILER REDACTED], to delay the revelation of that truth until pretty late in the story. I played around with where exactly the reader would encounter this piece of information, but I was aware of it from pretty early on in my process, and I always knew I was going to hold off and let it be something that the reader encounters somewhere late in the story.

This is actually an interesting aspect of fiction writing.  In terms of catching and holding the reader’s attention, the specific details of your story often aren’t as important as how you go about revealing them. (There is a smart short essay on this subject by the thriller writer Lee Child, from the New York Times — https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/08/a-simple-way-to-create-suspense/)

Paperback: out July 18

How did you plan the book?

My process tends to be that when I first get an idea, I write a whole bunch really fast, when I still have the big fire of it burning hot, and then when that fire starts to cool a little I spent some time outlining, so then when I go back to the draft I have given myself a road map. But then as soon as I start writing again a bunch of new stuff happens I didn’t anticipate, so the outline becomes moot, so then I go back and re-do the outline; the whole process repeats over and over again as I go. There is a lot of false starts and doubling back and rethinking and re-writing, even before I get to a coherent “first draft”.

What were your intentions when writing this book?    

To use my ability as an artist—and specifically as a thriller/mystery novelist—to approach what is a longstanding and widespread national crisis, i.e. systemic racism in a wide variety of American institutions. I’ve said this elsewhere, but I hope people understand this the book is not me creating this terrible dystopian version of America just to use as an interesting backdrop for a mystery. To the contrary, the goal is to use my skill as a mystery writer to approach what I consider to be our most pressing national issue; a way to ask why the hell are we still living with these institutions and attitudes that were born in the time of slavery? 

In earlier drafts, how did the story end?

There were drafts of this that continued past the existing ending; there were drafts that ended much earlier. There were a lot of drafts.

How much of the story was planned before the first draft was written?

Not much—see my earlier answer.

In your own opinion, do [REDACTED REDACTED]

God, I certainly [REDACTED]!

How would you respond to criticisms that say that this is not your story to tell, as a white person?

I absolutely understand and respect those readers who view a work like this with skepticism, given A) a long and ugly history of white artists representing black characters in gross ways, and B) a long and ugly history of people of color not being afforded the opportunities to tell their own stories. I only hope that if people do actually read this book, they discover that A) I approached my characters and my story with as much knowledge and research and respect as I was able, in order to NOT be one of those gross voices; and B) this book is not me as a white person trying to “pretend to be black”, or claim authority on black history, but rather me as a white person trying to be honest about American history—to do what all white Americans should do more of, which is to reckon with and take responsibility for a long history of systematic racism against nonwhites.

I do take deep exception to the idea that I, as a white person, could never possibly credibly write a black character—to suggest that whites and blacks are so different that the act of fictional empathy could never bridge the gap is an insult both to fiction and our common humanity. 

Last night I posted a link to a piece by Jamelle Bouie on Slate, whose commentary I have found so smart and powerful in the last few weeks. This morning Slate posted their new Audio Book Club podcast, which is a discussion of Underground Airlines and Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad. The three participants in the conversation are Laura Miller (who reviewed the book originally on Slate), Katy Waldman, and Bouie himself.

The conversation is in-depth (about race and the economics of slavery), fascinating, and shadowed by recent events. (And by the way, I’m honored once again to share a spotlight with Whitehead’s near-miraculous novel.)