BOOKS AND BLOGGING PHILOSOPHY

Philosophy is defined as a theory underlying or regarding a sphere of activity or thought. Well, my theory is if I can add at least 10 new books to my Wishlist and move at least 5 older Wishlist selections to my TBR list every month, then life is a ice cream sundae. And if I can find those 10 books from at least 5 new blogs each month then that's the cherry on top.

NEW VISITORS AND OLD- WELCOME!

NEW VISITORS AND OLD- WELCOME!
Well, I've made it almost 5 years now, so for better or worse, I continue on. I tend to blog in spurts as the urge to be creative erupts. As I don't have an artistic bone in my body, you will see very few changes in the layouts. Hey, I'm a reader not an artist like so many of the awesome bloggers I follow. I know you don't always have the time but if you stopped and looked, take a half a minute and say your piece. Recommend a book that you have enjoyed or hated for that matter. Thank you to all who visit.
Oh, and I moved my Google Friend Connect info and share this buttons to the top, as without our friends, who are we?


Thursday, April 6, 2017

Blog Tour For MOM by Collin Piprell


MOM
Magic Circles Series#1
Collin Piprell
 Genre: Sci Fi
 Publisher: Common Deer Press
 Date of Publication: April 5, 2017
 ISBN: 978-0995072961
Number of pages: 373 pages
Cover Artist: Common Deer Press

 A mystery thriller set in the second half of the twenty-first century, MOM is the first novel in Collin Piprell's darkly comic and always thought-provoking MAGIC CIRCLES science-fiction series.

A GOD IS BORN!

TOO BAD ABOUT THE PERSONALITY DISORDER

So reads the graffito.

MOM is the mall operations manager — the greatest intelligence in history, a machine awakened to self-awareness at a time when the last few human survivors have withdrawn to the last two remaining refuges on Earth. Quarantined from the global nanobot superorganism outside the malls and from each other inside, the mallsters are utterly dependent on MOM for everything — including the ever-more suspect information they're getting about the world Outside.

Now the malls are crumbling.

Amazon     Common Deer Press    BN


Excerpt:


THERE’S MORE to the Buffalo Shuffle, now,
than lackadaisical dancing. Some 
larger skewedness is lending a hallucinatory edge to things. Cisco believes
it’s inside his head, at first—attributes it to the incessant flicker and flash
and the crash of classic rock ’n’ roll. The dancers
are stepping back and forth, back and forth, over and over, faster and faster, 
caught in a local loop. Leary and Brian are still there at the wraparound bar.

“Where’s Bia?” Cisco yells at them as he approaches.

“You young fellers,” says Leary. “You mean to say you’ve gone and misplaced her?”

“Was 
she good?” Brian leers. The music has suddenly stopped, so this query comes 
across loud and clear. Then the lights come up and everything holds still, a 
fluorescent morgue.

“A 
go-go bar with bright lights and no music,” says Leary. “What a cockroach feels 
like caught out in the open.”

 Things 
are going awry. Cisco’s senses of place and balance tell him he’s moving, 
though in fact he’s standing at the bar. He glimpses an evil grin just before 
Brian wheels his chair around and heads off towards the back of the bar. Leary 
is looking uncharacteristically apprehensive. Things are fast going to hell. 
Cisco hasn’t seen this type of disintegration in a long time, even in drills. 
Today’s Worlds are supposed to have intregral fail-safes. Nevertheless, Cisco 
expects the nausea and handles it. Leary doesn’t look well, but he seems to be 
under control. “This isn’t good,” he manages to say before a blast of music 
drowns him out.

It’s 
interesting, from a technical point of view. Spotlit in the gloom at the far 
end of the stage a good ten meters away, Cisco can see, in exquisite detail, a 
constellation of pink and blue and gold glitter stuck to a dancer’s bare
backside. But the floor at his feet has gone indistinct, a featureless mystery. 
Then, when he looks up again, he can’t even see the girl, or the end of the 
stage. The flashing red light that marks the toilet is only a pulsing smudge.

Cisco 
checks back to the near distance, and now the detail is surreal. Cisco fights 
down another twinge of nausea. The spatio-temporal axes are badly askew. He  
looks away from it all to collect himself; he focuses on the floor in time to 
see the roach hit-and-run victim reconstitute itself, its mess all coming 
together from the smear. Sporting a single bit of red glitter on its carapace, 
it scuttles backwards to disappear amid the debris. Cisco is gripped by the 
strongest sense of déjà vu he’s ever experienced. He sees Leary deck the burly 
tourist, the same guy as before, the same wham-wham-wham combination except 
this time from a different perspective. The ebee jerk drops his beer bottle, 
and Cisco hears the smash from behind the bar—the visual and spacialized 
auditory cues are out of whack. Two or more different pieces of music are 
blaring. The beats accelerate, subtly at first, then faster, and Cisco resists 
the natural inclination of the heart to race in sympathy. An instant later the 
beer reappears on the bar. The guy drops it again, and it smashes. This time 
the sound comes from where it should. Cisco watches as the shards reassemble 
themselves and the beer is sucked back into the bottle. He ducks at the smash 
coming from just above and behind his head. The bottle smashes and reassembles,
smashes and reassembles. The sound is coming from random points, no longer in 
phase with the visual representation of the bottle’s impact.

“Let’s 
go!” Leary is shouting at him. “Let’s get out of here.” His lips aren’t in sync 
with the words. “Sorry, Kid. I’m bailing.” Then he’s gone.

The 
World is falling to pieces. Rapid foreground-background reversals are being 
complicated by phase dissonances and fractal oscillations. This is chaos. Cisco 
can’t tell whether the motion-and-perspective trackers are functioning; even if 
they are, they wouldn’t be able to make sense of this. Bangkok World is fast 
disintegrating, reality engines on a runaway track to total dementia. Part of 
it briefly resolves itself as a bargirl wobbling past on platform boots—maybe a 
real telep, given that she appears to be panicking—though the sound of her 
passing doesn’t even register, much less include reverb. A scream issues from 
Cisco’s shirt pocket, some woman expressing acute distress, although Cisco 
knows she isn’t really in his pocket.

He 
can bail anytime he wants to, but he doesn’t want to yet. He falls against a 
barstool and clips his forehead on the bar top. There’s pain, lots of it. More
psychic than physical, but liberal doses of both. He shuts his eyes, pulls
closer to his center. This is only a perceptual thing, this assault on his
integrity. He can handle it. He knows he’s actually safe and sound back in his 
own cradle in ESUSA. He knows this, but it doesn’t reassure him as much as it 
ought to.
 He looks for his console, just so he knows it’s there. It isn’t.

Collin Piprell is a Canadian writer and editor resident in Thailand. He is the author of four previous novels and a collection of humorous stories, now out of print, as well as four books on national parks, diving, and coral reefs, which are also out of print. *MOM* is the first novel of Magic Circles, a science-fiction trilogy in progress. Visit www.collinpiprell.com to learn more.







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