South Korea, 1974: A young Korean woman dressed in a traditional chima-jeogori is found strangled on the frozen banks of the Sonyu River with only a calligraphed poem in her sleeve. US Army Sergeants George Sueno and Ernie Bascom are called in to investigate. But all that George and Ernie are able to glean before being kicked out of town is that they are close to the truth - and that a mysterious smuggler, known locally as 'the Ville Rat', holds the key to the woman's murder...
Award-winning author China Miéville began his astounding career with King Rat—now in a new Tor Essentials edition—a mix of a young man's search for identity with a pulse-pounding story of revenge and madness. With a new introduction by Tim Maughan, author of Infinite Detail. Something is stirring in London's dark, stamping out its territory in brickdust and blood. Something has murdered Saul Garamond's father, and left Saul to pay for the crime. But a shadow from the urban waste breaks into Saul's prison cell and leads him to freedom: a shadow called King Rat. King Rat reveals to Saul his own royal heritage, a heritage that opens a new world for him, the world below London's streets. With drum-and-bass pounding the backstreets, Saul must confront the forces that would use him, the ones that would destroy him, and those that have shaped his own bizarre identity. Tor Essentials presents new editions of science fiction and fantasy titles of proven merit and lasting value, each volume introduced by an appropriate literary figure. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
When he loses his job as a trader after the stock market crashes, Shigeo Segawa is offered lucrative work as an industrial spy. How could he say no? He is soon assigned to seduce an ex-girlfriend and steal an important formula from her husband, who runs a large chemical company. But when the husband is found murdered, Segawa becomes the prime suspect.
"Disney is so good at being good that it manifests an evil; so uniformly efficient and courteous, so dependably clean and conscientious, so unfailingly entertaining that it's unreal, and therefore is an agent of pure wickedness. . . . Disney isn't in the business of exploiting Nature so much as striving to improve upon it, constantly fine-tuning God's work." --from TEAM RODENT TEAM RODENT How Disney Devours America "Revulsion is good. Revulsion is healthy. Each of us has limits, unarticulated boundaries of taste and tolerance, and sometimes we forget where they are. Peep Land is here to remind us; a fixed compass point by which we can govern our private behavior. Because being grossed out is essential to the human experience; without a perceived depravity, we'd have nothing against which to gauge the advance or decline of culture; our art, our music, our cinema, our books. Without sleaze, the yardstick shrinks at both ends. Team Rodent doesn't believe in sleaze, however, nor in old-fashioned revulsion. Square in the middle is where it wants us all to be, dependable consumers with predictable attitudes. The message, never stated but avuncularly implied, is that America's values ought to reflect those of the Walt Disney Company, and not the other way around." BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from Carl Hiaasen's Bad Monkey.
