Alexander Besher
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Alexander Besher (born in China in 1951) is a San Francisco-based author, journalist and novelist, and former contributing editor to Infoworld magazine. He was born to Russian parents and raised and educated in Japan.
He is the author of The Pacific Rim Almanac (HarperCollins, '91), as well as the Rim trilogy of futuristic thrillers. He has just completed The Hanging Butoh, the first title in his new Hanging Butoh trilogy of alternative noir fantasy novels. His novels have been translated into over a dozen languages.
[edit] Rim Trilogy
(Including Rim, Mir, and Chi)
Rim (HarperCollins '94; HarperPrism, '95, Nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award) is set in the wake of a mega-earthquake in 2027 Japan, the virtual-reality entertainment empire Satori Corporation attempts to rescue thousands of people whose minds are trapped in virtual worlds, including the ten-year-old son of professor and virtual reality investigator Frank Gobi.
Mir picks up nine years later, as Frank's son Trevor Gobi is tracking Mir, a new breed of virus lethal to both technology and humankind, as it travels from person to person through sentient cybernetic tattoos.
In Chi (Simon & Schuster, '98 and '99), it is 2038, and the world of cyberspace is again being manipulated for immoral purposes. The head of an Asian biotechnology drug cartel is siphoning off vital chi essence from enslaved humans to produce bootleg high-demand "chi products", which cause temporary mental, physical, digital, and vital enhancements of every sort. Frank and Trevor Gobi return to set the world right in this thrilling sci-fi adventure.
[edit] Dance of Darkness Trilogy
(Starting with The Manga Man nè The Hanging Butoh)
It is the year 2062. Ever since collective dreams became privatized, everyone is trying to muscle into that market with their own unreality-based REM sitcoms, adventure serials, and sleep-soaps.
It's a world in which things, already gone awry, get further convoluted. Now the International Planetary Union must deal with the latest threat to global security, the newly remilitarized state of Imperial New Nippon which is determined to release a psi-virus codenamed "Fingermoon,"in a bid to conquer Mediaspace.
Enter Jake Hill, a brain-damaged American writer of bio-anime action serials who finds his once popular "Tao" Smith REM-strip hijacked by Johnny Hara, the "Hanging Butoh," a deadly assassin who dances his kills of New Nippon's warlords through the steps of Butoh, the Dance of Darkness which preaches salvation not through Enlightenment but through "Endarkenment."
Will the Manga Man stop the Hanging Butoh or join him in the race to save the world before the last curtain falls on human history?
