Percy, Benjamin

Benjamin Percy is the author of three story collections; Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction; and five novels – The Unfamiliar Garden, The Dark Net, The Dead Lands: A Novel, Red Moon: A Novel, The Wilding: A Novel, and, most recently, The Ninth Metal (Mariner). He also writes Wolverine and X-Force for Marvel Comics. His fiction and nonfiction have been published in Esquire, where he is a contributing editor; GQ; Time; Men’s Journal; The Wall Street Journal; The New York Times; and The Paris Review. In The Ninth Metal, what begins as a celestial marvel becomes a planetary crisis. A meteor shower brings to Earth a new metal – an “omnimetal” that possesses world-changing properties as an energy source and a weapon – to Northfall, Minnesota. Soon, the town’s iron-ore dynastic family finds itself in a cutthroat war for the mineral rights and mining operations, as foreign leaders, competing corporations, and the U.S. government all vie for control. It’s a high-stakes, modern-day gold rush. Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, praised it as “Wildly entertaining and highly original mélange of northern Minnesota lore and slam-bang near-future SF action … Percy’s dead-on local color, strong central characters, and well-integrated flashbacks into the making of a modern samurai will delight and entertain both comics fans and serious science fiction readers.”