Christopher Ruocchio is a graduate of North Carolina State University, where a penchant for self-destructive decision-making caused him to pursue a bachelor’s in English Rhetoric with a minor in Classics. An avid student of history, philosophy, and religion, Ruocchio has been writing since he was eight years old and sold his first book —Empire of Silence— at twenty-two.Ruocchio's new novel is Howling Dark, the second novel of his galaxy-spanning Sun Eater series.
Recently I asked the author about what he was reading. His reply:
The truth is, I haven’t had much chance to read anything of late. Between production on Howling Dark’s sequel and manuscript submissions at my day job, my reading’s been quite thin. If you’ll forgive me for going back a few months, the last book I really had the chance to sit down and read was Robert Hugh Benson’s Lord of the World, a dystopian SF novel written in 1908 set in aFollow Christopher Ruocchio on Twitter.unified, communist Europe told mostly from the perspective of the man who becomes the last Pope. It was written by Father Benson (himself a Catholic priest) as a critique of H.G. Wells, then a J.K. Rowling sized celebrity, and his vision of technocratic utopian socialism, which Benson believed would only bring about horrific consequence (I’d contend the horrors of communism in the 20th century proved him quite right). I can’t remember on whose recommendation I picked it up, but as someone whose own fictional worldbuilding involves a great deal of reaction-against-technological-progress, it’s served as a kind of research. In my personal opinion, it ought to be required reading alongside Orwell and Huxley, and indeed I consider it the best of the three, both as entertaining literature and as a work of prophecy.
My Book, The Movie: Howling Dark.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
