Tag: Under the Whispering Door

opens in a new windowLast year, TJ Klune’s  opens in a new windowIn the Lives of Puppets released to tremendous acclaim. This year, it’s releasing in paperback, making this story of queer robots and real love available to new readers! TJ’s here to talk his book and explain how he’s going to make you fall in love with a vacuum cleaner named Rambo.

Check it out!

Dear Reader,

Once upon a time, I took you to an island to find a home where one should not exist. After, I invited you to a mysterious tea shop where the living helped the dead find meaning and purpose, joy and acceptance.

For my next trick, I’m going to make you fall in love with a vacuum cleaner named Rambo.

Okay, wait. Let me back up a minute.

I am so thrilled to present In the Lives of Puppets, a queer retelling of Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio. In the following pages, you’ll be going on an adventure unlike anything you’ve seen from me before. Though this story deals with robotics, androids and machines of all shapes and sizes, it is firmly rooted in fantasy, a fable that explores the ideas of kindness, humanity, and forgiveness, including who has the right to forgive.

This book is not The House in the Cerulean Sea. This book is not Under the Whispering Door. There is no stuffy, bland middlemanager bureaucrat in need of a wake-up call or an attorney who finds life after death. There is no island to discover, no tea shop to make a home. This is the story of an already happy family who built each other up and carved out their place in the world. And this time I’m taking their home away from them. I’m sending them on a journey across a strange and dangerous country to save one of their own and fight to reclaim the happiness they worked so hard to build together.

But in this journey, you will find hints of the familiar: love, life, and the hope for a better future, all wrapped up in a story of loyalty in the face of betrayal and how even the smallest of us can make a difference when called upon to do so. It is also about the heart and soul of Victor Lawson—the main character, and the only human of the bunch. Though he was raised by machines, I set out to show that Victor’s humanity could not be denied, that it wasn’t something that needed to be justified or earned. It just is, and in this unforgiving place, it counts for something. Perhaps everything.

But Vic won’t be going it alone. He will have his friends with him: Rambo, the vacuum who wants only to be loved (so you better get on that, no pressure). Nurse Ratched, a nursing machine who has a few of her wires crossed, sadistically so. And a machine with a dark past. A robot with secrets locked away in his head. An android with blood on his hands and a heart in his chest: Hap, also known as the Hysterically Angry Puppet.

Together, they must do the impossible: travel to the soulless heart of this world and bring the last member of their family home. And in doing so, they will learn the truth about the past, the present, and the future of all things.

Are you ready for an adventure?

TJ Klune

Order  opens in a new windowIn the Lives of Puppets in Paperback Here!

opens in a new windowIn order to properly explore the definition of humanness, TJ Klune wrote a book populated mostly with robots. And just like how humans appear often inherently contradictory, with resolution uncovered by effort and analysis, he also wrote a letter to help explain his thought process in asking this big, big question, and in answering it in his own way.

Enjoy : )

With opens in a new windowThe House in the Cerulean Sea, I wanted to explore what it meant to be a better human. In opens in a new windowUnder the Whispering Door, I asked what does it mean to be a good human?

With In the Lives of Puppets, I wanted to try and find the answer to something much more difficult: what does it mean to be human?

We are a bundle of contradictions. We laugh and create and hope for things that might not ever come true simply because we want them. And yet, in the same breath, we can be callous. Cruel. Destructive. That thing we hoped for? That thing we wanted? Sometimes, we will do whatever it takes to get it, even if it’s to our own detriment, or the detriment of others.

But there’s nothing like us, as far as we know. We are war, we are peace, a dichotomy that has been around for as long as we have. That’s the thing about humanity: we have hearts and lungs and blood pumping through our veins—each and every one of us—but we still find reason (illogic though it may be) to tear down, to ruin, to burn.

Why is that?

I don’t know. To say I do would be a lie.

Here is what I do know:

Whatever you believe in, wherever your faith lies, we—as a species—are unique, wonderful, and terrible in equal measure. I love people, even if they continually disappoint. I love our idiosyncratic ways, the way we splash in water even though we can’t hold our breath that long. If we see something or someone in distress, most of us would try and help. We can go to space! We fly. We say ow even if something didn’t hurt (just because we though it would). We put glittery things in our ears and noses and change the color of our hair. We hold hands and hug and get that feeling of unparalleled joy when we come home after a day away and find our dogs or cats or ferrets waiting for us.

Victor Lawson—the main character of In the Lives of Puppets—is human, the only one who can make such a claim in his family. He might, in fact, be the most human character I’ve ever written. He is everything I love about us, and a few of the things I don’t. He makes mistakes, tries to learn from them, and maybe will make the same mistake again.

But he is brave, he is just, and he’s going on a journey that will prove humanity—for all its faults—cannot be denied.

TJ Klune

Pre-order opens in a new windowIn the Lives of Puppets Here:

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