In honor of the debut of the TV series FlashForward (based on a novel by Robert J. Sawyer) ISFiC Press is having a sale until November 10:
- Buy Sawyer’s collection Relativity and any one other ISFiC Press book direct from the publisher, and deduct 10% from your order total (before sales tax and shipping);
- Buy Relativity and either two or three other ISFiC Press books, and deduct 25% from your order total (before sales tax and shipping);
- Buy Relativity and four or more other ISFiC Press books, and deduct 40% from your order total (before sales tax and shipping).
ISFiC Press is, of course, the publisher of my novel The Cunning Blood , and here’s your chance to pick it up at a discount.
About FlashForward I can’t tell you much, since I don’t watch TV, but the concept is intriguing: Everyone on Earth blacks out for 137 seconds, and experiences a kind of timeslip, each seeing visions of his or her own future. The blackout itself causes mayhem on a grand scale (though I wonder if it would be as grand as the premise suggests) and government agents begin searching for Suspect Zero, who was caught on tape awake during the blackout and might, therefore, have had something to do with it.
But about The Cunning Blood I can tell you a lot: It’s a hard SF future action/adventure, featuring a prison planet where electrical devices don’t work, due to the presence of a pervasive bacterium-sized nanomachine that homes in on the magnetic fields around electrical conductors and literally chews the conductors until the circuit fails. Hell’s inmates do all right in spite of not having electricity, as there are a lot of different ways to build a technological civilization, and even a few ways to get around those pesky nanobugs. (Think wires made of liquid mercury flowing through hoses.) But the bugs on Hell are kid stuff compared to what’s lurking in the bloodstreams of selected individuals on Earth: highly intelligent distributed nanocomputers, supposedly under the complete control of the secret societies of engineers that created them–except for The Sangruse Device, which has a slightly different concept of “control.”
I’m guessing that my long-time readers have already heard most of this, but if you’re new here, the novel has reviewed well and might be worth a look. Here’s a sample chapter. And another sample chapter, which I just carved out of the novel to post for the first time. (It will make more sense if you read the older sample first.) If you like action, ideas, and cultures completely unlike our own, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.
