Prepare yourself for full exposure @BradleyWind #Review #SciFi #Giveaway

Blurb

If light records everything we do, can even shadows hide our secrets?

Imagine your entire life is available for review.

Imagine each day any event can be watched over and over again - your birth, your first kiss, your recent shower, that private itch - all replayable from any angle. Now imagine these can be viewed by anyone at any time.

Is a world where there is far less ego, little crime, and even the smallest moments are recorded and available publicly through the ‘Grand Archive’ a Utopia or a Dystopia? Traumatized by memories he does not want to recall, artist Ben Tinthawin is recruited by the enigmatic, Grand Archive creator Dr. Mamon, who seeks help for his nextgen designs to enhance the world. Ben stumbles across a secret revealing the doctor’s true scheme in all its surreal splendor and questions whether the doctor really is the benevolent soul he claims to be.As the paths of a broken man and a brilliant revolutionary cross, the world shifts and cracks start to appear. Even our most fundamental codes can be encrypted – or corrupted. If the wrong information is discovered, more than Ben’s life will be in danger of total shut down.

Prepare yourself for full exposure.

Excerpt

Someone put the wrong teeth in my mouth last night. The canines poked at the back of my lips as if they didn’t fit. I wanted them either buried deep in the gums or all removed. I hate teeth.

Trash trucks moan like suburban whales while they back down my cul-de-sac. The truck eeping irritated me more than the sharp light. Wallpaper images of two windows beamed sunlight onto my head. BUD programmed the walls and sounds from archives of the room I had growing up for today’s alarm. I needed extra help waking most mornings but especially ones like this.

“Shall I turn the alarm off?”

“Yes. Thanks, BUD."

 

My prominent sense of teeth in my mouth dragged me back to the memory of my disturbing dream—another in the monster series.

“Would you care to dictate your dream, or will you be typing today?”

“In a minute.”

Lying among the pillows for the rest of the afternoon would’ve been nice, but morning bladder ousted me. A glass-horn urinal emerged from the wall when the bathroom slid to a greater diameter. A glimpse of myself as the mirror flipped revealed the monster – although I guess there’s nothing new about my dark circles and bedhead hair. The sight prompted me to dictate last night’s werewolf dream while the concern for my mental well-being drained away with yesterday’s juice.

Damn teeth! I could use a drink. The canines still felt glued to the inside of my mouth. In the mirror inspection, my little porcelain cleavers appeared normal. Gross, but normal. Most of the time, it only took the image of lips separating a fraction to think of an opened wound. Beyond the teeth, disgust stemmed from dripping saliva, hordes of bacteria, and raw flesh waves of the palate. It all made me question the stability of dentists.

Review by Lisabet Sarai

Some science fiction books feel like mysteries. The author pitches you headlong into a foreign world, with technology, history, assumptions and problems very different from our own. As a reader, you have to follow the clues and figure out the rules in order to understand how the author’s imagined universe works. The process can be both frustrating and exhilarating. Each step you take toward comprehension provides a special kind of satisfaction. At the same time, the effort required to figure out the remaining puzzles sometimes makes reading as exhausting as it is pleasurable.

Bradley Wind’s novel BULB definitely fits this description.

As the story begins, we meet the protagonist Ben Tinthawin, a twenty nine year old “neuronal artist” who has been suffering from horrific dreams in which he becomes a monster. He is the guardian for his artificially created, conjoined twin brothers, Ed and Francis. The twins can wreak a lot of havoc, given that they have the minds of seven year olds but adult-sized bodies.

Ben’s father died in a horrific accident that left Ben both physically and emotionally scarred. His friend and therapist Laurel urges him to review the recordings of the event in the Grand Archive in order to work through his trauma, but Ben resists. Gradually, we come to understand that the Archive retains the records of everything that happens, to everyone on the planet, wherever light can reach.

The existence of “Informed Light” and the Archive it supports have revolutionized society. Anyone can view any instant in their own lives, or someone else’s. A terrible loss of privacy, some might argue, but with the openness of the Archive, society has become far more egalitarian and crime has almost ceased to exist. The supposedly unfalsifiable Archive serves as the gold standard of truth.

But then, what about the Faux Life Movement? Somehow, the members of this shadowy organization manage to fabricate Archive sequences that border on the absurd, pieces of performance theater which can’t be traced back to their antecedent events. No one understands how the FLM manages this. Intrigued, Ben and his best friend Lenny engage in their own outrageous masquerades, trying to attract the attention of FLM members.

Meanwhile, Mamon, the brilliant scientist who invented (or discovered) Informed Light, recruits Ben to work at his Center, where he pursues research that he claims will liberate humanity from error and suffering, and reveal the fundamental truth underlying existence. Ben works with the Saints, individuals who have voluntarily signed up to live their lives in a coma, generating energy to fuel Mamon’s studies. Using their journals as a source, Ben composes images to make their endless sleep happier and more comfortable.

At this point in the book, I had dozens of questions. How did the Archive come into existence? Why were the twins created? What is Mamon really trying to achieve? Who is the mysterious Susan, the woman who contacts Ben out of the blue to “talk about books”? What is the true mission of the Saints?

The journals provide the first solutions to some of the book’s mysteries. I thought this was a brilliant literary device, to help the reader tease out some of the threads in this complex story. Ben uncovers more clues as he wanders around the Center, trying to find his brothers, who seem to play some as-yet-unknown role in Mamon’s plans. Then he visits Susan in SkyCity, only to encounter shocking new information about his own life, the Archive, and Mamon’s ultimate objectives.

I wish I could say I completely understood the dramatic climax and the unexpected conclusion of BULB. Unfortunately, many aspects of the plot remained obscure to me. I don’t know whether this can be attributed to my own lack of comprehension or the author’s failure to effectively communicate all his ideas.

It’s probably the former; Bradley Wind writes very well and has a powerful, visual imagination. The book is studded with startling, creative scenes and vivid descriptions. Imagine, for instance, a “sport” in which people can catch a ride on a tornado, or a nightclub where you immerse yourself in a lake of intoxicating drugs.

Furthermore, my confusion didn’t stop me from enjoying this original and thought-provoking novel. It offers creepy moments worthy of a horror story as well as slapstick humor. Mamon turns out to be the prototypical mad scientist, ultimately consumed by his own visions. Ben is sensitive, brave, broken and believable. Lenny provides comic relief as well as stability. And Laurel, the mother goddess, brings true light into the darkness generated by Mamon’s twisted ambitions.

If you enjoy science fiction that makes you think, consider trying this book. It’s not easy, but it has its rewards.

About the Author

Bradley Wind was born and raised in Pennsylvania. He is a prolific visual artist whose work has exhibited in the 20th-century wing of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

He worked as a toy designer for K'nex Industries, a manager of IT for Pearl S. Buck International and is currently a director of IT for a child-focused non-profit. He raises chickens and two lovely girls with his wife in Chester County, Pennsylvania.

BULB is his latest novel.

Author Website: http://www.bradleywind.com

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07XTNB6QX

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48394221-bulb

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bwind3/

FB: https://www.facebook.com/authorbradleywind/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/BradleyWind

BookBub: https://www.bookbub.com/books/bulb-by-bradley-wind 

 

Bradley Wind will be awarding a $15 Amazon/BN GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.

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Romance from a male perspective -- #erotica #romance #literature

By David Russell (Guest Blogger)

I came to writing romance quite late in life. My university education had conditioned me to despise and ignore the idiom, partly because of its purported lack of ‘literary substance’, and partly because of its ‘escapism’ and purported evasion of the painful realities of life. But my attitude gradually changed, because I realised that escapism is a great source of comfort, and reading it could help to defuse painful tensions, and help maintain equilibrium and control over life.

I felt I had to make a struggle to integrate literary style and substance into romance stories, to give these stories a fully-developed, in-depth background and setting. My previous writings had been highly abstract and speculative, and I felt there was a need for the concrete. I now feel that I have achieved some equilibrium between the romantic and the hard/speculative.

I am indeed one of that comparatively rare ilk – a male romance writer in a field heavily dominated by women writers. I would like to feel I bridge the gulf between old and new attitudes – old romance, with its celebration of the ‘eternal feminine’, together with the openness of contemporary swingers and the like. In spite of my sympathies with the latter, I do not care for the ultra explicit. I think the celebration of Eros is far more potent if it is expressed obliquely, metaphorically, and if it leaves adequate areas to the imagination. After all, a truly euphoric experience has some of the qualities of a voyage into the unknown.

My struggles with the idiom are reflected in the make-up of my characters. They all have a high degree of intellectualism, and carefully monitor their passions. My main literary influence in this area was the surrealist novel The Girl Beneath the Lion (Le Lys de Mer) by André Pieyre de Mandiargues. They are inhibited, full of inhibitions, and have frequently been badly scarred by destructive relationships. I use a great deal of ‘flashback’ technique to give the reader some historical perspective on their lives. Yet, in spite of everything, they retain an urge for excitement and adventure, perhaps to fill in crucial experiences absent from their formative years.

I consider myself sensitive to gender issues and politics. My heroines are strong minded, and I wanted to get inside the minds of such dynamic women, which includes facing their ambitions and insecurities. I realise that the finest romantic poetry was written against a background of extreme taboo and repression. Did this enhance the allure of the ‘forbidden’? Has something been lost through ‘liberation’ and the easy availability of instant gratification? There are of course two sides to the equation. Let us never forget that the ‘prim and proper’ Victorian era was a high time of prostitution. Some of my style is evocative of early 20^th Century writing. So perhaps my heroines are also trying to sustain traditional romantic values in the face of contemporary cultural debasement.

About Pearlman

This book was inspired by a passage in the Spanish epic poem La Araucana, which I have translated. In the original story, a Spanish soldier, after a battle, is accosted by an Indian woman who asks him to lead her to her husband's body, to pay her last respects. In the original story, she disappears. In Pearlman the hero is contemporary, but he does time and space travel to those legendary times, and the woman turns out to be Auchimalgen, the Araucanian Moon Goddess. She seduces and enlightens him. There is a backdrop of Chile, with its incredibly volatile ecosphere and long history of protracted conflict. This story combines romance with sci-fi and time travel.

Excerpt

Her skill in undoing my armour was worthy of any trained white man. “We are supremely adaptable; we learn avidly from those we observe and oppose”, she whispered, her teeth gleaming in her smile. As I saw the chain mail and the cuirass lying there, discarded, I saw that the rust had all disappeared.

Deft hands tenderly peeled my sweat-ridden leather and cotton; it was lovely to be nursed without immediate wounds to distract from the exquisite sensations.

“You must be proud of your exertions!” she said. The power in her words was akin to a duelling challenge. (The time warp flashed me into my happy collaboration with that beautiful fitness trainer, when I imagined that lithe, toned form excelling itself at the Olympic High Jump as her prelude to our delicious consummation.)

I looked up towards her breasts, to see the matching metal, discs, chains, bangles – an array of gold, silver and jade; I sensed their resilience beneath their cover. She read my response with total ease; with a radiant smile, she whispered “do as you have been done by.”

My hands trembled a little as I delicately negotiated the pins and clasps, but I succeeded in making a harmonious pattern of them, like a crown at the head of my discarded armour. It was good to have gained intimate knowledge of those metallic treasures in the museums.

The face of a full moon, reciprocating its radiation on Tegualda’s face and eyes, beamed its glittering reflections, as if casting off a diaphanous robe, to reveal the perfect body of its illuminated rocks, bouncing back and forth around the elaborated grid of our variegated metalwork – steel, bronze, silver and gold – its luminosity almost suggesting that it would all come to life, radiant in the flames of their smelting, almost as two armies facing each other. In turn, the beams flooded our faces, giving an external flourish to our luminous vibrancy charged from within.

She took my hand, and made it caress her sealskin robe: “please do the honours”. I lifted it at the bottom. My hands reached up inside it until they could feel her firm but still slender waist. Repeating my earlier gesture, she raised her arms in surrender and conquest, the robe clouding into a transient veil over her noble features.

Then Tegualda cast off her gleaming white cotton camisera for me with all the challenging flourish of a toreador. She tamed me and fired me simultaneously with her lovely self-revelation.

The walls of my time-capsule were fractured. There glistened across the world, ricocheted back and forth across the centuries a composite of the world’s beauties, celebrated in poetry and song, painting and sculpture, melted, distilled and poured into one vibrant, impassioned, soul-suffused body. Egyptian and Grecian statues and mural figures melted into an array of Hollywood dream sublimities deeply embedded in my memory. This was a spiritual earthquake, embracing all history and culture, the distilled essence of all artistic striving poured into one giant goblet.

Buy Links

Amazon.co.uk:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Pearlman-David-Russell-ebook/dp/B0776G2JRF

Amazon.com:

https://www.amazon.com/Pearlman-David-Russell-ebook/dp/B0776G2JRF

Release Day post with Giveaway

www.brittanysbookblog.com/.../pearlman-by-david-russell-release-day-with-giveawa...

About the Author

David Russell is a resident in the UK. He writes poetry, literary criticism, speculative fiction and romance. His main poetry collection is Prickling Counterpoints (1998); his poems have also been published in online International Times. His main speculative works are High Wired On (2002) and Rock Bottom (2005). In 2013 he published his translation of Spanish epic La Araucana. Recently he has turned to romances: Self’s Blossom; Explorations; Further Explorations; Therapy Rapture; Darlene, An Ecstatic Rendezvous (all published by Extasy, soon to be re-released from Bella Tulip Publishing). He has also self-published a collection of erotic poetry and artwork, Sensual Rhapsody, 2015. In addition to writing, David is also a singer-songwriter and guitarist with two CD albums Bacteria Shrapnel and Kaleidoscope Concentrate, and many tracks on You Tube, under ‘Dave Russell’.

Find out more at www.davidrussell-author.blogspot.co.uk

Current Events

By Nobilis Reed (Guest Blogger)

Whenever I see something exciting or intriguing or infuriating come up in the news, my first instinct is to write a story about it. It's a perfect example of the principle, "When your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a Loki."

I resist that temptation. By the time a story is published, even on the short turnaround of self-publishing (because I don't publish stuff that hasn't been edited) the individual news item will be somewhat stale. On the other hand, as a writer of speculative fiction, I feel it's important to comment on how human society is changing. Some folks argue that that is what science fiction, at its core, is about. But these two impulses are not incompatible.

What I've learned to do is this: I take a broader view, and look at the trends implied by the events. What would the world look like with broader corporate power, and governments that are generally unable to restrict them? What would the world look like with androids that appeared nearly identical to humans? How would society adapt to the ability to finely control how our brains work?

Those questions will continue to be important. Things will continue to come up in the news on those themes, and they will continue to provoke questions. That means that stories about those themes will continue to be relevant, at least for as long as it takes to get a story out there for people to read.

At this point, you might ask, "But Nobilis, you write erotica. Erotica is for escapism. People don't want to be thinking about profound issues of world-shaking import when they're getting their rocks off." My answer is: Screw that. I think that erotica is a perfect place to talk about society. Sex is one of the most personal, most intimate aspects of a person's relationship, and when events in the world intrude that far into a person's life that it affects their sexual relationships, it's an important event indeed.

Now that's not to say that every story I write has deep sociological meaning. I write plenty of fluff alongside more serious work. But I see no reason not to talk about things that are important to me, just because I write erotica.

What do you think? Do you like to think about what sexual relationships might be like in other circumstances than the here and now? Comment here and in one week (July 16, 2014) I'll pick one commenter at random for a free copy of "Metharmea's Journey," an exploration of fluid sexuality in a context of radical, bizarre body modification.

Incursion at Gene Bunker Four by Nobilis Reed

Three women guard one of the world's most precious resources--a man. He is one of only a few that remain after the mysterious gender plague turned the vast majority of humanity.  Females Sasha, Andie and Lena are about to discover the purpose of the gender plague, and will feel all of the terror--and the ecstasy--that those responsible can bring.

Matharea's Journey by Nobilis Reed

She journeyed deep into the underground world of her own time and found it Hell, Heaven, and Purgatory - all in one! A mesmerizing science fiction novel of tomorrow's disturbing possibilities that are already emerging today.

Metharmea discovers a secret world where the human body can be transformed. Will she chose to change? And how? And what price is she willing to pay?

The human form is a work of art. Over the centuries it's been depicted on canvas, in stone, and using all mediums. The body itself has been decorated and embellished yet the basic anatomy has remained the same. But what if it's no longer fantasy? Or not just artwork any more? When science is able to transform human flesh into these fantasy bodies, who will undergo the transformation and at what price?

An erotic science fiction novel that pushes the boundaries of modern fiction.

About Nobilis

A few years ago NOBILIS REED decided to start sharing the naughty little stories he scribbled out in hidden notebooks. To his surprise, people actually liked them! Now, he can’t stop. The poor man is addicted. His wife, teenage children, and even the cats just look on this wretch of a man, hunched over his computer and shake their heads. Clearly, there is no hope for him. The best that can be hoped for is to just make him as comfortable as his condition will allow. Symptoms of his condition include a novel, several novellas, and numerous short stories, and the longest-running erotica podcast in the history of the world.

Make It Your Own

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