Ever hear of a Renaissance Man?
Now the Woke call us other things.
Whatever.
A Native American woman descending into insanity believes her infant son is the incarnation of Quetzalcoatl; ancient Aztec God of human sacrifice. She has pursued her Dark Lord in adoration across the ages, offering herself for bloody human sacrifice lifetime after lifetime atop the temples, just to approach the awesome and terrible presence she loves. Now, at last, they meet in this world and not the next as she stares into the eyes of her infant son.
Deep in the jungle headwaters of the mighty Amazon river, in the foothills of the stratospheric Andes Mountains, a shaman converses with a jaguar in a psilocybin induced vision. Every day the wail of chainsaws and the sound of bulldozers and guns grows relentlessly closer to the ancestral lands of their Tribe. Generations earlier they freely roamed a vast jungle, endlessly revisiting the ancient villages of their ancestors. But now their backs are against a pitiless wall of snow covered mountains and there is nowhere to go but up the valley and into freezing fog and death by starvation. But the jaguar speaks of a One who will come as an apocalypse upon the termite people who have destroyed their world. The One will come. It is promised.
Read More
The author succeeds magnificently, avoiding genre pitfalls... Big-idea sci-fi readers will likely find this an awesome, challenging ride.'
-- Kirkus Reviews
UPDATE! Postscript details theoretical foundations of warp-drive used in the story. See: 'A Plausible Mechanism for the Velocity of Hyper-fast Pulsars'.
It is late in the 21st Century; later than people realize. The population of Earth has surged to over 10 Billion people when climate disruption wreaks havoc on humanity's agricultural breadbaskets. Most continue believing the hopeful platitudes of the mass media as food stores empty, but one has decided that the approaching Apocalypse is none of his affair. He has quietly liquidated his fortune, made preparations, and is leaving...
For the Stars.
Time is running out, money is getting tight, and Hollywood fantasy is a non-starter. Building a Starship on the cheap requires insane boldness and operating outside the law. Needed components are scattered globally among military junkyards, industrial equipment auctions, and wartime black markets. The huge gamble is that a new math theorem, gaming supercomputers and radical software will unleash the vacuum energy of quantum space on giant super-magnets salvaged from the Large Hadron Collider in the European Caliphate war zone. Survival is a great motivator, and approaching doom helps you think outside the box. Also, it helps to luck into an few insanely brilliant engineers, a junkyard genius with a global reach, and a Mars colony willing to deal rather than return to a doomed Earth. Earth's first Starship is a Black Swan, flying into a blue sky.
As Earth tries to shoot it down.
Read More