T.R. Brown's Blog: Reflections author blog, page 5

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Excerpt
Why read science fiction?

Satellites, computers, the internet, all of these things that we take for granted today started out as science fiction. As time goes on, the rate of technological advancement only seems to accelerate. Many scientists and futurists look at this rate of change and the application of More's law (a prediction that computing power doubles every two years) to other fields of human endeavor and foresee what they call a technological singularity, in our near future. The term singularity is borrowed from astronomy, where it describes the heart of a black hole. That is the point at which light can no longer escape and the laws of physics as we know them can no longer predict anything. In the case of the predicted technological singularity, it refers to a point at which technological advancement proceeds so rapidly that we can no longer predict what the future will look like.

Is there a problem with my book description?

A question for the readers.
My first book The Face in The Mirror: a transhuman identity crisis has received only one negative review on Amazon which probably makes me quite fortunate especially with only eight reviews so far. Unfortunately every so often the negative review ends up rated most helpful and tops the list negatively impacting my sales.
The negative review seems to be based on a mismatch between what the reviewer thinks my book ought to be about and the story I actually chose to tell.
My book description is:

What does it mean to be human?
Imagine you're in a horrible accident.
You expect to die!
Instead, you awaken in a body that is not yours.
Not even your own species.
Not even your own gender.
Now you must learn to live and function as a person in a genetically engineered body designed for war. As a member of a society where you are thought of as property and an abomination.
It is a transformation that causes Todd Herschel to reevaluate his sense of self, his gender identity, her sexual orientation, and how humanity relates to its biological creations.
If your brain is in a new body, whose soul do you have?

The reviewers objections are best summed up in his statement,

"The focus and pacing of this book seems to be the culprit. Based on that description you'd think that this would a cerebral, gritty, somewhat bizarre and perhaps action-packed entry to the world of tomorrow."

I don't see how the reviewer got the impression the book would focus on the setting rather than the protagonists psychological journey from that description but based on how many people have rated this review helpful it is a problem.
Can anyone suggest a way to improve my description in such a way as to eliminate the mismatch in expectations?

If you wish to read the full review, as well as the opinions of those that didn't misunderstand what the book was about you can find it @ getbook.at/thefaceinthemirror

Here's a sneak peak of book 3 Reflections of Hope.

Here's a sneak peak of book 3 Reflections of Hope.
It's still a first draft so please excuse any typos or other problems.

I have the most messed up family in the world!
You probably think that's just adolescent angst talking, right. That's because, you don't know my family. I'm Hope Hershel. My mom is Todd Hershel. Yes, that Todd Hershel, former ambassador, activist, spiritual leader to all neo people. What could possibly be mixed up in the family of such a famous woman?
Where do I start?
The adults in my family are Mom, Dad, Mother and my three Aunts/Dad's other wives Spitfire, Midnight and Meg. Yes, my parent's are polygamists, we're felis, it's fairly common. Most first gens are, because the tom's had higher casualties. The fact that I have a Mom and a Mother along with the Aunts is different. As is the fact that Mom's a cat and Mother's a human. See both my maternals are bisexual Mom's married to Mother and Dad while Dad is married to Mom and the Aunts. I was four when it finally dawned on me that Mom and Mother were sexually involved and I was a bit weirded out about it for months. I got over the weirdness but I still don't get how two girls can . . . you know.
Then there's the fact that Dad isn't really my father, he's not even related. It's not uncommon for first gen cat's either. They get out of the army and may not be able to hook up with a child's father, even if he's still alive. Both my older siblings and three of my cousins have different fathers. The thing is, everybody knows and it's talked about with them. No one ever talks about who my real father is or even that I have another father. It's obvious Dad, Goliath, isn't really my father. Anybody could smell it. Hell, my older bro, Chance, and sis, Dawn, are closer related to him than I am.
The day I found out the truth, I also found out the other deep dark family secret that I'd never even known existed.
I was six years old when it happened. The day started out ordinary. I was attending school in the kitchen, listening to Aunt Spitfire's history lesson with half an ear, while I read on my computer. Should I have been setting a better example as one of the older kids, probably. That didn't give that brat Donald a right to grab my computer.
“Give that back,” I told him.
“This doesn't look like the American Revolution,” The twerp said looking at the screen and holding it out of my reach.
“Stop playing around and pay attention you two,” Aunt Spitfire snapped.
“I just want my computer back,” I defended.
Donald hopped out of his chair and dashed to the door. “Then come get it,” He stuck his tongue out in challenge.
I wonder sometimes, how he can be so immature when he's only two years younger than me. I chased the little twerp down the hall and pounced on him. We skidded across the floor and bounced off the workshop door. “Give it back, you little freak!” I demanded.
Just then the door opened and I saw two black and gray paws just inside. “What, exactly, is all this about?” Mom asked as she stood over us.
Of course, she probably heard the whole thing. The door might have been closed but the workshop isn't soundproofed. “Don took my computer,” I said, nonetheless.
“She wasn't paying attention to the lesson,” My brother defended. The little tattletale!
Mom lifted me off my brother with one hand, then picked him up with the other. “That isn't your problem young tom,” She scolded, setting us back on our paws and taking my computer from him. “Don, no recreational net access for the rest of the day.”
“What?” He sputtered in protest.
“Would you like to make it two days?” Mom's tone was icy.
“No ma’am,” He said meekly.
“Back to your lesson then,” She ordered. Adding a soft swat below his tail as he turned.
I started to reach to retrieve my computer but mom was looking at it. “Step inside young lady. I think we need to talk.” She guestured for me to precede her into the room.
My tail was drooping as I walked in. I didn't often get to go into the workshop. Partly because some of the tools were delicate, partly because they could hurt you if not used properly. There were also a few of Mothers paintings and Dad's sculptures that probably weren't appropriate for my younger siblings and cousins. I tried very hard not to look at the topless painting of my mom on one wall.
Instead, I found my eyes drawn to a strange painting behind her desk. It depicted what looked like half Mom's face but with a human eye, the other half was a human face with her eye. A ghostly image of Mom, or perhaps my Aunt Shade, who'd died before I was born, was over the human side shoulder and a human man was over the other shoulder.
Mom noticed how I was looking at the painting and had a sad smile on her face. The look passed as she sat down and pointed to the chair by the sculpting table. “Sit down.” I sat and waited for her to say something. She studied my computer for a moment before setting it down. “I thought you were supposed to be studying the American Revolution for the next week or so. So why were you looking up service records for felis in Americas war with the Caliphate?”
I looked down. I was so busted. “I was trying to find something.”
“I'm sure you were. What exactly?” Mom didn't sound angry, but her ears were drooping and her tail was stiff. I wasn't sure what that was in her scent. Fear mixed with concern?
“I was trying to figure out who my real father is,” I whispered.
Mom looked . . . I'm not sure, angry, hurt, sad. “Goliath,” She stopped her voice catching. “Goliath is your father in every way that matters. He's been there for you your whole life, isn't that more important than a genetic contribution.”
“So, I shouldn't be curious?”
Mom sighed. “Little one, sometimes, curiosity leads you to things you'd be better off not knowing.”
“What's that supposed to mean?” What could possibly be so bad?
Mom stood up, circled the desk, then crouched down so she could look me in the eye and took my hands. “Little one, you are a good thing that came out of something horrible. The silver lining to one of the darkest clouds in my life. That's what's important. Not the name of a person who got me pregnant.”
The way she said it gave me a horrible feeling about how I must have been conceived. “Mom, were you,” How the hell do you ask your mother this? “Did he force you?”
She was crying as she nodded. “I'd really appreciate it if you stopped looking. If you find out about him, it won't be anything good.”
It was hard to hear, that I'd come from something like that. “How could you keep me after that?”
Mom pulled me close in a tight hug. “You listen to me. You were innocent of anything that happened. What that monster did to me was awful. You are wonderful. I love you and always will.”
I pulled away feeling confused. “It's a lot to take in.”
“I know it is. I'd rather you went your whole life not knowing this but I didn't want to lie to you either.”
“So are their any other deep dark family secrets I should know about?” I asked half joking.
Mom stood up and looked from me to the painting and back. “Do you know why I don't like what you called your brother?”
Talk about sudden change of subjects. “You never like me calling him names. No matter how much he deserves it.”
“I'm especially displeased to hear you use that one,” She took a few steps away from her desk and seemed to be studding another painting, of her and a human man in an outdoor market. Her next question seemed to come out of the blue. “What do you know about your aunt Shade?”
I took a moment, to think about it. “She was, like, your twin right? Chance was really hers but you, kind of, adopted him after Grandma and Grandpa got him out of the states with Dawn. They actually raised Shade and adopted you later too, didn't they?”
“Did you know that for her whole life she felt like she something was missing?” Mom asked.
“Because you were raised separately?” I guessed.
“Many years before a human boy was born who went through life with much the same feeling. He was born in Denver before the second civil war. He lost his parents when the city was nuked. For years he blamed how he felt on that, even when he was a grown man. Then, one day, shortly before Shade was killed, he was in a horrible accident.” Mom gestured across her chest just below her shoulders. “He was crushed from about here down. He was lucky that paramedics were nearby, at another accident. Because they put his brain on life support. It was ironic, he'd been a cybernetic engineer on a project trying to make mechanical bodies for people like he ended up being. Everyone they'd tried to help that way ended up going crazy, so they were pretty desperate to find a way to help him.”
“What's he got to do with aunt Shade?” I asked. Mom had pretty much lost me.
“When Shade was shot her heart kept beating and her body kept breathing, even though most of her brain had been smashed. Before they developed lab grown artificial organs they used to take them from recently deceased people. The doctors treating the human man used that idea and put the man's brain in Shades body.”
It took me a moment to get what mom had said. “Do you mean there's a human guy out there with your sisters body?”
She gave me a sad smile. “They found out that parts of Shades mind lingered on with her body. Parts of the man's mind had been lost with his body. Those parts came together to make a whole person. Some people called her a freak, which is accurate in some ways. But she was also the product of a miracle. The miracle was, God had known all this would happen, even before the human was born. He split one soul between the two of them and when the two parts came together, their soul was made whole again.” She looked at the painting of the two half faces again then back at me. “That whole is me.
“Shade wasn't my sister. She was my missing half. The felis part of me. That's the other family secret, that you're now old enough to find out about.”
I just sat there for a minute, trying to understand what I'd just heard. Mom was aunt Shade? Mom was a human? Mom was a man? It was just too much to take in. I mumbled something about needing time and ran from the room. Mom called after me but by then I was halfway out of the condo. When the door closed I dropped to all fours and kept running.

New Kindle Countdown Deal

The Face in the Mirror: a transhuman identity crisis kindle edition will be 99 cents through the end of 2013.
getbook.at/thefaceinthemirror

Kindle Countdown Deal!

Starting tomorrow Chained Reflections getbook.at/chainedreflections will be $0.99 through December 2nd.
My first book The Face in the Mirror: a transhuman identity crisis getbook.at/thefaceinthemirror will be $0.99 starting December 2nd through the 7th. You'll be able to get both books in my reflections series for under $2.00

New Author Website

I've set up an official author website. I'll still be putting updates and world background here and on my Facebook Page. But if you have friends who might be interested in the series you can point them there.
T.R. Brown Author Wix site

What Todd takes for granted part 6

Much as the production of many goods has been moved from big factories to local 3-d printers the media has undergone a decentralization process as well. The current convention of television networks and movie studios has been replaced for the most part with on demand programing. The one exception to this is breaking news programing which is as always time sensitive.

Even the news media have undergone a major shift. The exposure of collusion between certain political parties and major news outlets by independent news blog organizations in the decade before the second civil war led to major public distrust in the traditional news outlets. Unfortunately the need that most news blogs have to sell advertizing leads to at least as much biased journalism as there ever was under the old system. On a positive note though the increase in the number of available news outlets makes it possible for a savvy observer to identify bias much more readily than they could when there were fewer outlets to choose from.

On the entertainment side of things increases in computer power and crowd-funding has almost completely killed off major film and movie studios. It is now possible for an average portable computer to produce such high quality visual effects that anyone with the talent and the right software can make something that fifty years before would have required a major studio to provide. Consequently it is much easier for gifted amateur filmmakers to find and keep an audience. Unfortunately it's also much easier for less talented filmmakers to produce release and distribute crap. Generally though the highest quality products tend to get more online chatter and ultimately more revenue but this is not universal. Sometimes things that are bad are able to get an audience anyway.

This boon to filmmakers is an even bigger boon to would be actors. Many an actor now starts working for a very low wage or even for free on some minor project and if they are talented enough, find themselves receiving offers for more lucrative jobs from more prosperous filmmakers.

Another effect of the advances in technology has been the near demise of the movie theatre. Already suffering with the advent of large screen home theatre systems the final nail in their coffin was the advent of virtual and augmented reality systems that could give any audience a "screen" large as they could want with even more enhancements than any theatre could provide. For example a viewer in V.R. can enjoy all the smells along with the sights and sounds of the show and even reach out and touch elements of the three dimensional presentation.

Then of course there are the fully interactive games that allow the viewer to be a full participant in the story in ways that make modern video games look tame in comparison.

What Todd takes for granted part 5

As much as the productions of consumer good has changed the production of food has changed even more. As is mentioned in the Face in the Mirror most meat productions occurs in artificial tissue growth facilities similar to those that produce replacement limbs and organs. These facilities are much more cost effective in producing meat than traditional farming and ranching methods for several reasons. First, they are considerably less space and labor intensive than taking care of active living animals. Second, they can grow the cuts of meat that are the most in demand. Third, they can control exactly what goes into growing the meat even more precisely that the most controlled factory farms.

Not that everyone likes artificially cultured meat. Smaller farms do still raise animals the old fashioned way for a small minority of consumers who don't trust factory produced food.

Fruits, vegetables and grains are produced through a mix of tissue specific lab grown cultures, hydroponics and old fashioned farming techniques. It is still more cost effective to grow grains and rice in the fields than by other methods. Natural sunlight and rain are much cheaper than artificial lighting and irrigation even with the need for weed-killer and pesticides. Many orchards on the other hand have been replaced by fruit bearing branches cultured in a lab without the need to support the bulk of a tree. Such artificial growth facilities also allow the grower to regulate the type of insects that have access to their crop. Although some growers use microbots (insect sized machines) to completely replace the insects involved in pollinating their crops. Hunter killer microbots are also used in lieu of pesticides on some farms. They are centrally controlled (or use distributed computing) and programed to eliminate members of insect species that are harmful to the crops they guard. Such machines are not reliable enough yet to have completely replaced chemical pesticides but they are greatly reducing the need for them. There have been experiments with airborne swarms of microbots being used as scarecrows but this has met with protests from some environmental groups.

What Todd takes for granted part 4

The presence of ubiquitous computing, augmented and virtual reality may be some of the least unusual things about the world Todd Hershel lives in.

Most small consumer goods aren't sold at retail outlets anymore. Most homes have 3-d printers that can print out anything the size of a modern cell phone or smaller. Larger products can often be printed out as components and assembled. A typical home printer uses high strength carbon composites that have a tensile strength comparable to turn of the century steel. High end industrial models can work with a much wider range of materials and on a much larger scale.

Operations costs of large scale 3-d printing it uneconomical to print out whole cars, for example, but most of the components on the assembly line are printed out on an as needed basis.

Most businesses that would be retail today have been replaced by shops that have larger printers optimized for a specific type of product. An autotailor for example is a 3-d printer optimized for clothing. Not everything is printed out on demand, though. For many products the convenience of being able to pick the item off the shelf and take it home immediately outweighs the benefit of having it custom made.

This has led to massive societal changes. Only larger products are shipped from a factory to a distributor to a retailer. Most are produced on site at the retailer. Much of the cost of consumer goods in Todd Hershels life comes from the retailers overhead and the licensing fees paid to the people who produced the plans the product is made from (assuming the product is not public domain). Black market printing services will often provide cut rate products by omitting the licensing fees much as bootleg song and film downloads do today. On the other hand the purchaser of a black market product has to worry about whether it has been produced to the safety and reliability standards of the authentic product much as those who download bootleg content have to worry about getting a virus along with their content. On the other hand someone who downloads bootleg movies only has to worry about their computer being harmed. Someone who buys a black market hot plate might end up burning down their home if it doesn't work right.

Virtual Book Fair

Check out the virtual book fair. You may find your next favorite author. Quite a few authors, including me, are participating.
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