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The Next Novel is Under Way!

The next book series is plotted out and chapters are flowing. This book takes place in the Eupocalypse Universe, but hundreds of years later. It’s a  space exploration/first contact story with a twist: the unknown planet the characters are going to is Earth!

Want a sneak preview? Here’s an excerpt from the book:

The woman walking towards them was tall, with vivid blue eyes and white hair that hung to her waist. She wore a flowing muumuu that had streaks of vivid pattern and design in it, enhanced with electronic random switching which made it impossible to avert one’s eyes.

“Privell!” the two men rose instantly to their feet.

The word Privell did not have an exact corresponding meaning in the cultures of centuries earlier, back on Earth, but a Privell, having been conceived using full-sequence shaping of DNA and epigenetic data, was one of the few people who outranked a poet in Presidium society.

“Oh, you don’t need to stand on ceremony here.” Privell Donna put one of her elegant hands on Stephron’s forearm and Stephron sparkled at her. Lao loved Stephron’s easy charm, which reflected back on him, and made everyone envy him for having such a delightful spouse.

“Donna.”

“Hello Lao, long time no see. Have you been bolted in your chambers composing the next great codex?”

“Maybe working a little too hard, I admit it. I am long overdue for a break.”

“Well, if Amun and I join you, perhaps we can all enjoy a little break together. I’m a little exhausted myself.”

Her husband, Amun Cawnotee, came up behind them. An earnest but kind, virile man, dark of hair and olive of skin, dressed all in white, his grace matched his wife’s elegance. Amun was a Privell as well, one of the few who merited the title from the Soul on postnatal testing, rather than being genetically engineered to it. He and Donna were an illustrious, influential duo.

The drone arrived and took their order and the four friends settled in to enjoy the last smears of radiant color settling on the horizon. A cool breeze arose from the river at the bottom of the canyon, bringing a piney scent to their nostrils. The many-times-great-grandsons of Earth crickets began to chirp as the stars flashed into being in the golden sky, and the sky gradually faded from shimmering beige to café au lait to a deep chocolate brown.

A few drinks further into the evening, Privell Donna leaned forward and whispered to Lao, “so I assume that you’ve been noticing some new edits in your work?”

Lao looked right and left. He knew, but Donna as an icon of the virtue and representative of the will of the Soul was not supposed to let any of her confidential knowledge slip. Of course, Privells were known to bend those rules, especially when they were with higher-status people such as himself.

“Why yes! May I speculate that you perhaps know something about that?”

“You may speculate all you like.” Donna leveled her gaze at him over her spectacles.

“Oh, don’t look over your glasses at me!” said Lao.

No one actually needed glasses on Presidium. Yet somehow having something that framed your eyes gave the impression of increased intelligence.

“It is atavistic, don’t you think? Yet, amazingly effective.”

“Until you remember that no one has needed glasses since the first settlers fled Earth’s destruction.”

Donna shrugged, not the slightest bit embarrassed by her pretension.

“As for what I may or may not know,” she said, “I can’t confirm or deny, however, I would allow a little bit more time for anything new that you put into the system over the next few months. It’s always exciting when big changes are afoot, don’t you agree?” Amun snorted, but Donna ignored him.

 

I come in peace
Making First Contact
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Silenced as a Writer

A post has been published on my poetry-and-politics blog, www.consistentprinciples.wordpress.com. I usually try to keep that blog separate from my science fiction writing, because I think fiction should stand on its own. But this post pertains to an alarming experience I had related to promoting the Eupocalypse series on Amazon, and I think it’s important.

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Sign Up for Newsletters

The thrill of hearing about it when a new reader discovers my books never gets old! I like to keep in touch with my readers via e-mail as well. Click on the link below to sign up to receive a newsletter every couple of weeks.

graptolites floating
CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP FOR E-MAIL NEWSLETTERS

This is different from subscribing to the blog posts, which include a little bit more in-depth coverage of some of the concepts in the books and how they relate to events going on in the world today. Why not do both?

What happens next when I sign up?

You’ll get a series of confirmation and introductory e-mails over the next week or so, and then you’ll get newsletters one to four times every month. Of course, you can unsubscribe any time.

Don’t forget to whitelist eupocalypse.com in your e-mail client to make sure you get the confirmation e-mails!

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The Unintended Consequences of Well-intentioned Ecological Fixes

Rebecca Helm tells us in the January 22, 2019, issue of The Atlantic:

Home to vibrantly colored, tiny creatures, the ecosystems floating on the ocean’s surface remain all but unknown…The Ocean Cleanup says it wants to protect animals at the ocean’s surface from plastic, but neuston is the ecosystem of the ocean’s surface. There is a reason turtles and sunfish eat floating surface plastic: It looks like neuston. Using these wall-like barriers to collect plastic in spite of the neuston is like clear-cutting a canopy in the name of helping a forest. There is no point in collecting plastic if by the end there is nothing left to conserve.

Consider this message in relation to the world apocalyptically upended by the fictional gene modified bacteria in the Eupocalypse series. It’s critical to ask: is the way to fix the harms of one technology necessarily another technology? Is it appropriate to give “cleanup” technologies a pass, when “profit” technologies are subject to rigid review? How do governments compensate for human ego, greed, and wishful thinking in the non-profit environmental sector (or do they)?

 

 

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Excerpt From: Peri Dwyer Worrell. “Watch It Burn” (Eupocalypse, #2), Chapter 36

Bad things happen

when you’re a brave adventurer looking for risk in a cruel world. Such things happen to wealthy girls in country-club neighborhoods and to poor girls who grow up in the slums. Sometimes you never see the guy again (other times he winds up nominated to the Supreme Court)…

“Once she was lying down in the dark, the ghosts of her past that Mother Laura had summoned came back to haunt her. She remembered her first love; she fifteen and eager to dispose of her virginity, Dennis a worldly-wise (or so it seemed) sixteen, and more than willing to help. They used to find little niches like this one in the unmowed corners of the parks, around the backs of alleys they’d slip their supple teenaged bodies through chain-link fence to get into, or (her favorite) on a blanket on the roof of his apartment building, the sun in its blazing heat bringing out the contrast of his brown skin with her pale whiteness.
One day, he lay on one elbow after they’d made love, stroking her sleek, firm adolescent body, and said, “One day, we’ll be married and have a daughter. She’ll have café-au-lait skin and eyes as green as yours.” D.D. smiled now, remembering.
Then she remembered Yvonne, Dennis’s mother, who had figured out their oh-so-transparent lies and gumshoed them up onto the roof. D.D. in her bra, picking up her shirt to pull it on, turning and coming face to face with Yvonne’s furious demand that they come downstairs right now!
Delaying it, dressing slowly and apprehensively, dragging their feet down twenty-four flights, to find Yvonne and D.D.’s parents embedded in the living room. Yvonne shrieking into her face words like whore and slut and aren’t you ashamed? D.D.’s mother and father silently taking in the cruelty, speechless and unsure how to react, Dennis posed rigidly, expressionless, a stone, not looking at her or taking her hand, underneath the Eldridge Cleaver poster on the wall.
No, I am not ashamed. I will never be ashamed. And I am never coming back.
Her parents still sitting, still impassive, on Yvonne’s sofa. The door slamming behind her so satisfyingly, the doorman downstairs backing up a step when he saw her furious tear-streaked face. She didn’t remember walking home, but she would have stopped the tears and put on a street face, because crying white girl’s tears in the street of that neighborhood was like slinging a bucket of chum to sharks.

Getting to her walk-up tenement building somehow. Unlocking the first door, to the street, and Calvin coming up, the boy who had been eyeing her when she walked by the crowd of Puerto Rican and black boys who hung out on the next street—eyeing her but not saying anything crude or making kissing noises or hissing sounds, like some of them did. She’d smiled at him a few times before she met Dennis, and even wrote in her diary that he was cute, making a little heart instead of the dot over the “i” in his name.

Calvin was suddenly behind her in the entryway as she fitted her key in the second door and turned it, and then he was pressing her against the wall at the foot of the stairs, bigger and more solid than she’d thought, his mouth bruising hers and his chest squeezing the air out of her lungs. Laughing when she struggled to push him off her, covering her mouth with his again when she finally got enough breath to try to scream, his hands, his cock, his rancid smell, the pain, and too late, the sound of a door opening upstairs and another tenant clattering down the stairwell, five floors up.

He’d ghosted. She’d pulled up her shorts and run inside her family’s empty apartment before anyone could see her like that. She had cried herself to sleep, as she was crying now.

…And waking at the first light of dawn, shivering and wet with dew, with hands and face bloated with bug bites.”

 

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CHINESE OIL SPILL: BEGINNING OF THE EUPOCALYPSE?

Burning oil tanker sinks off China's eastern coast

This could be it! The Eupocalypse could be underway right now! The Sanchi oil tanker was breached and created one of the most massive oil-transport spills in history! Lurking within the chemical and biological agents being sprayed to contain that spill are genetically-modified hydrocarbonoclastic bacteria.

This is so much like what happens in Machine Sickness and the soon-to-be-released sequel, Watch It Burn, that it’s positively eerie.

Not sure if you’ll like the Eupocalypse books? For a low-risk intro to the series, the first book will be available at Amazon for 99 cents until the release of Watch It Burn in April, 2018.

Can’t get enough of the Eupocalypse world? Download the free short story Nefertiri’s Warriors, a dreamlike fantasy that takes place thirty years in the future. and also receive e-mail author updates.

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Free Fantasy Story

Nefertiri’s Warriors is a short fantasy story which occurs in the future of the second book in the Eupocalypse series, Watch it Burn, to be published in early 2018. Fill out the form below to receive notifications of free books and stories, and to be among the first to know when the next book in the series is published!

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