John Shirley's prophet-in-the-cyberwilderness voice deserves high billing among the best.
-- Roger Zelazny
This classic of cyberpunk literature brings John Shirley's "A Song Called Youth" trilogy to a thrilling conclusion. After the fundamentalists of the Christian Fascist Second Alliance find themselves discredited in the United States, they make a final, terrifying stand in Europe. Their genocidal program of concentration camps, mind control through media manipulation, and secret treaties goes unopposed -- save for the rebels of the New Resistance. Forging an uneasy alliance between Israeli and Muslim fighters, the guerilla warriors lead the battle to prevent the Second Alliance from sending humanity into the darkness of a total eclipse.
A gripping novel in its own right, Eclipse Corona follows Eclipse and Eclipse Penumbra, Shirley's previous tales of a gang of technologically adept rebels with a passion for sex and drugs and rock and roll. The "eclipse" of the titles refers to the shadows that war casts across the light of conventional morality, allowing citizens to tolerate the erosion of their civil rights. Originally published in the 1980s, the Eclipse trilogy has proved chillingly prescient in its anticipation of twenty-first century issues, from drone surveillance to the growth of Europe's radical right movements to an increasingly dark web of media manipulation and propaganda.
