God Shock - Blurb

Synopsis

Athena is an infomercenary, she gets paid to sift. Intelligent software crafted in her fibre-optic nest, her sift engines and AI spiders have gained her a healthy profit. A client has just made the mistake of paying her too well for a job. Curiosity overtakes caution and drops her hard into an adventure that stretches from the madness within, to the drug induced climax of the human species.

A fast epic, GodShock follows Athena inside an institute where reality is detuned. Through a hidden city where pleasure has been fine tuned into a weapon against the frightening assault of boredom. To the beautiful and twisted cyberscape of a diseased intranet. All the way to the threshold of her sanity. Luckily her sense of humor is well intact…

Excerpts

“Wake up man, you just slept through Armageddon,” she said, roughly shaking the deadweight Saladin by the shoulders. He came awake with the bleary eyed reluctance of a teenage boy being torn from a wet dream into a hangover.

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Whoever said money can't buy you happiness obviously didn't know where to shop…

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    “The truth is: there is no truth.” He seems quite pleased with this statement.
    “Oh, very clever oxymoron there. Bravo.”
    “Actually it isn’t as simple as an oxymoron, it’s a self referentially inconsistent statement. It also happens to be the truth.”
    “I have four words for you: Anal retentive bastard...”
    “That’s three words.”
    “...exactly.”

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The coroner surveyed the charred collection of bones and pronounced it, with astounding professional accuracy, dead. What the coroner failed to ascertain with accuracy was the true cause of death. On the file it all looked very convincing “Death by incineration”, but in fact the onus for Rutherford’s death lay with a messianic madman whose cranium he had recently sawn into.

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An infomercenary, Athena gets paid to sift. She sits with the posture of a catatonic shaman as her lungs squeeze shallow breaths. Outside of her self induced coma the world buzzes with static. Psycho and techno babble is ranting out a billion bits per second, oozing and spitting out of the pores of society. Screens flicker through evangelic mutterings, AI spiders crawl the web, sifting through the thick overgrowth of shit info, scanning for hard data. A loud hiss of an alarm brings her coughing out into consciousness.

Commentary

    Not only does God Shock vibrate with adventure, but the book is a font of conceptual sci fi, providing ‘by the way’ solutions for such conundrums as: Cure for Cancer; Artificial Intelligence; Unified Field Theory; Utopia Paradox; Meaning of Life; and How to get laid without losing your dignity. And these are not idle boasts (except for the last one, everyone knows that’s an impossible myth).

                                                              – Syhthia Ticsoma

    A plot driven narrative of existential post-post-cyberpunk, dark-edged, comedic, technophile adventure, love story (-ish)

                                                              – Some Verbose Pretentious-Prick

Reviews

LOCUS October 2001, Jennifer A. Hall