Today, I have the honor of welcoming one of my favorite authors to my blog. I loved Lindsay Edmund’s first novel CEL & ANNA, which I almost didn’t read because science fiction isn’t usually the genre I’m interested in. But I liked Lindsay’s blog posts and I figured I’ll give it a try. I am glad I did. I loved her interesting and quirky characters, the humor, and the funny jabs at modern government and society. But most of all, I realized that behind those imaginary beings are real people with real human feelings and problems. Besides, who has ever written about a computer who falls in love with its owner? What was even more intriguing was the fact that I fell in love with Cell, the computer. But enough preamble. Here is Lindsay. Take it away!
Good People Doing Their Best
Your family trilogy is about good people doing their best. Karla Bocelli and Andreas O’Reilly and their three children do not have trouble-free lives, but their approaches to trouble are heartening. These people fix things. They also make things: Karla is a painter; Andreas, a stonemason. This is heartening.
I read EMILIA on a summer Sunday, and it was a pleasure to hang out with these folks. The armchair tourist in me also enjoyed the locales of Switzerland, France, Peru.
Scratch the surface of an ordinary life and you find there is no such thing as “ordinary.” It’s a myth, and a lazy myth, that a person can be reduced to a cliché.
In this blog announcing my new novel WARNING: SOMETHING ELSE IS HAPPENING, I want to
focus on the human characters and how they solve their problems.
Living Life No Matter What
In October 2013 I spent a happy long weekend in Chicago, Illinois, aka the murder capital of the United States. In the murder capital of the United States, people were out walking, driving, shopping, chatting, sightseeing, running businesses, and walking dogs. Even in the most dangerous parts of the city people were out living their lives, heroically though no one will give them medals for it.
The characters in WARNING live in an unstable society under an overstretched, unraveling government. The United States was ravaged by another civil war and has been reassembled under the name of the Reunited States. The country is showing signs of coming undone again.
In spite of the hard times they endure, people get on with their lives. They have relationships, they do their jobs, they cope with the harshness and weirdness of their lives. They chase their dreams. They unravel mysteries. They pray. They make mistakes and correct them. They adapt, adapt, adapt.
Computers have turned us into a nation of typists, but computers will never turn us into computers. In the end, as novelist Russell Hoban put it: “the things that matter don’t necessarily make sense.”
____________________
WARNING: SOMETHING ELSE IS HAPPENING is Lindsay Edmunds’s second science fiction novel. It is a dystopian fairy tale,
populated with Networld e-beastswho feel about humans the way natives feel about foreign invaders. Its regular price will be $3.99. but it is on sale for $1.99 through January 19, 2014, at
Amazon,
Amazon UK,
Barnes & Noble, and
Smashwords.
Lindsay Edmunds blogs about machine intelligence, books and independent publishing, movies and TV, and life in southwestern Pennsylvania at Writer’s Rest. Drop by, say hello, and share a story or two. She is newly on Tumblr, looking for people to draw her e-beasts and sometimes blogging about old movies, and on Twitter.
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