Bøger af Christopher Nissen

Haven of Dust is a novel of speculative dystopian fiction, set in the near future and describing the breakdown of American society in the face of the Second Civil War, a contest that pits Red states against Blue after a major economic collapse. Recounted in the third person, the narrative centers on the experiences of Karima Makauskas, a forty-six-year-old high school English teacher whose calm, orderly existence in an Illinois town is disrupted by a massive predawn artillery bombardment. When refugee life in Chicago is rendered impossible by food shortages, social unrest and air attacks, Karima decides her only option is to make a desperate effort to rejoin her twelve-year-old son, who has been cut off from her in California. On a wider scale the novel describes the breakdown of a polarized American society, but it concentrates just as much on the character of Karima, a woman whose confused identity and dysfunctional family have left her unsure of her ability to cope with hardship and war. Her often conflicted relationship with her principal traveling companion, the headstrong teenager Molly, mirrors the ideal condition of the country as a whole: they are at odds with each other, yet forced by circumstances to cooperate and coexist. Although citizens of a Blue state, Karima and Molly suffer abuse at the hands of men from both warring sides, and thus come to the conclusion that their only real enemy is the war itself. Karima's experiences during a year of wandering, and the lessons she learns about human nature, are meant to reflect the agony of a nation riven in two. As she moves through the ravaged landscape, often on foot when her fuel runs out, she encounters people who have attempted to create parallel societies in order to offset the effects of civil conflict. In every case, these "pocket paradises," sometimes founded on religious or pseudo-religious precepts, provide no lasting solace to Karima and her companions. Forced to reassess all her former values as a high-minded schoolteacher, Karima ends up living like a bandit in the wilderness, plundering, destroying and killing in order to stay alive, enduring all the brutality and degradation of the nation as a whole. Haven of Dust is inspired by the current political atmosphere in the United States, where one hears serious references to such terms as secession and civil war. The emphasis of this work is on the general tragedy of such a war and its effect on individual civilian refugees, without explicit promotion of any political point of view. The narrative is conceived in the American tradition of the dystopian road novel, in which refugee characters make their way toward a vaguely defined geographical goal while gaining social and moral insights from the communities they visit along the way, in the fashion of Huckleberry Finn. Haven of Dust comes to approximately 127,860 words.

"Hyperborea: Migrations" is the first book of a two-part science fiction series dealing with the colonization of Hyperborea, a planet on the far side of the galaxy, by Earth corporations in the twenty-third century. When communication with the home planet is lost and a volcanic eruption destroys the colonists' city, the survivors are forced to make a new life in a forbidding environment. With the temperature constantly below zero and most water trapped beneath volcanic rock, the Hyperboreans can only survive near geysers and thermal vents. Even the use of fire is lost for lack of combustible materials, along with every technological advance that had once been supplied by the home planet. Long after the eruption, only a few thousand people survive, dwelling in crude stone huts constructed over thermal vents. In the tiny settlement of Good Hope, life is preserved by two haphazard sources of nourishment: large underground tubers that are tended by miners forced to work in total darkness, and protein scraped from the backs of a giant, sluggish, indigenous species, the domesticated "blumps." Life follows simple rituals, and almost all memory of Earth origins has been lost. Every year in the warmest season, the herders must lead their animals on the Migration in search of meager pasturage on the frozen land, alert to the attacks of a large predatory species, the fiendish "crabs" that emerge from holes to ambush and feed on the helpless blumps. In such a tenuous existence, even a minor catastrophe might doom the Hyperboreans to extinction. Only Nora, the last representative of a disparaged social class known as the Teachers, can still read the few documents that survive from the original colony, and only she still believes that human beings once lived in a far better place. In their efforts to cling to life in the brutal climate, the people of Good Hope have come to worship a fertility figure called The Big Mother, and to believe that human beings originated in the depths of the volcano that destroyed the old Earth colony long before. Reserved and anti-social, Nora is resigned to her solitary life and back-breaking work in the tuber mines, until one day she meets Desh, a younger, more exuberant Teacher from a distant settlement. Forming an awkward alliance, Nora and Desh stand in opposition to The Guide, a charismatic figure who likewise knows the power of books and words, and who manipulates the gullible Hyperboreans with promises of a warm, comfortable afterlife in a spirit world. When climate disaster, crab attacks and a massive quake threaten human survival in Good Hope, Nora must convince her backward, superstitious fellows that their best hope lies not only in defiance of The Guide, but also in an expedition across the waterless Eastern Plain, in search of a new home in the farthest reaches of Hyperborea. This expedition, led by Nora and Desh, will be described in the second book of the series, "Journey to Erebus."

Harlots of Jericho is a historical/biblical novel set in ancient Canaan, centering on the lives of two lowly prostitutes. In a first-person account, Hayyuma tells how her happy childhood is lost forever when she is sold into prostitution by her own mother for the price of three rabbits. Her only joy lies in the companionship of Rahab, a colleague whose affections and loyalties are too often fickle and self-serving. For a time, a love affair between the two women becomes the only means to defy the degradation to which they are both subjected. Hayyuma (whose name means "life" in Ugaritic Canaanite) is completely uneducated, although she has a vivid imagination and a fondness for ancient stories of heroes and gods. Only once has she seen the world beyond the city walls, when she was four years old. Her days are a round of endless trips in stifling heat to and from the city's life-giving spring, a jug perched on her head. Her nights are marked by turns with cold-hearted clients under the tyranny of Arhalbu, the Babylonian master of the brothel. When her daughter Tahuru is born, Hayyuma yearns to recreate the happy family life she thought she would never have again, and also to spare her daughter from the fate she herself has undergone as a brothel slave. But the threat to Tahuru becomes much more immediate when Jericho is placed under siege by an invading army that has pledged to destroy all its inhabitants. The invaders are secretly helped by Rahab, whose fascination for a new religion has caused her to turn on her fellow citizens. Now Hayyuma must choose whether to rely on Rahab as a last desperate hope to save Tahuru, or betray her former lover to the King of Jericho.The novel is pervaded with a central irony that defies the reader's expectations, since the "harlot" Rahab is enshrined in the biblical Book of Joshua as a heroine, as the only resident of Jericho to give allegiance to the God of the Israelites and thus escape torment and death when the city falls. In Harlots of Jericho, the familiar Old Testament story is retold from a humanistic perspective. The narrative is meant to provide a voice for a people who have been too often neglected in fiction, or anywhere else for that matter: the commonplace, lowborn victims of the Canaanite genocide. By extension, the confusion and anguish of these characters reflects that of all such victims, in whatever time or place. Throughout the story, Hayyuma and her companions are continually trying to understand what is happening to them. They are baffled by the muttering of the priests, by the empty pronouncements of voices of authority, by conflicting accounts of the will and nature of the gods. Hayyuma's efforts to ingratiate herself to Rahab in order to save her eleven-year-old daughter's life lead to her own act of betrayal, when she reports Rahab to the authorities for hosting the Israelite spies who have prepared the city for destruction. All betrayals-of friendship, love and the city itself-come to a climax on the final day of the siege, when the fabled walls of Jericho are destined to collapse and all the inhabitants, save Rahab and her family, will perforce be put to the sword.Harlots of Jericho is a tale for our own time, and for our newly diversified views regarding traditional depictions of exploitation and genocide. Throughout the novel, the introspective Hayyuma muses on the meaning of her wretched existence and the place of humanity in a universe ruled by heartless and implacable forces. Only an eleventh-hour miracle, brought about by the least likely character in the story, can save Hayyuma's hope for victory over a lifetime of despair: her brilliant but moody daughter Tahuru. The salvation of this girl, and the sacrifices that are required to bring it about, become the ultimate expression of a human spirit that yearns to transcend the lowest instincts of our species.

Giulia Bigolina's (ca. 1516-ca. 1569) Urania (ca. 1552) is the oldest known prose romance to have been written by an Italian woman. In Kissing the Wild Woman, Christopher Nissen explores the unique aesthetic vision and innovative narrative features of Bigolina's greatest surviving work, in which she fashioned a new type of narrative that combined elements of the romance and the novella and included a polemical treatise on the moral implications of portraiture and the role of women in the arts. Demonstrating that Bigolina challenged cultural authority by rejecting the prevailing views of both painting and literature, Nissen discusses Bigolina's suggestion that painting constituted an ineffectual, even immoral mode of self-promotion for women in relation to the views of the contemporary writer Pietro Aretino and the painter Titian. Kissing the Wild Woman's analysis of this little-known work adds a new dimension to the study of Renaissance aesthetics in relation to art history, Renaissance thought, women's studies, and Italian literature.

Art and literature during the European fin-de-siecle period often manifested themes of degeneration and decay, both of bodies and civilizations, as well as illness, bizarre sexuality, and general morbidity. This collection explores these topics in relation to artists and writers as diverse as Oscar Wilde, August Strindberg, and Aubrey Beardsley.