Twelfth Planet Press announces acquisition of the science fiction novel Trucksong by Melbourne writer Andrew Macrae.
In a post-apocalyptic Australian landscape dominated by free-wheeling cyborgs, a young man goes in search of his lost lover who has been kidnapped by a rogue AI truck – the Brumby King.
Along the way, he teams with Sinnerman, an independent truck with its own reasons for hating the Brumby King.
Before his final confrontation with the brumbies, he must learn more about the broken-down world and his own place in it, and face his worst fears.
This genre-bending work of literary biopunk mixes the mad fun of Mad Max II with the idiosyncratic testimony of works like Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang or Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting.
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I spent my childhood in Toowoomba, in regional Australia, raised on the sound of articulated vehicles grinding up and down the Great Dividing Range. At night they sounded like mournful dragons.
I had a thing for the 1970s trucking movies that seemed to be on our old black-and-white TV every Friday and Saturday night, and the novel grew out of these cultural memories, along with a healthy dose of weird science fiction, like Jeff Noon’s VURT, which had a huge impact on me.
The trucks in my novel turned out to be incredibly vain. They like the latest in custom paintwork and decals, and they are very proud of their excessive sound systems, which they use to do battle. They’re also into sex, as it turns out.
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About Andrew Macrae: