So there’s this site called Kickstarter, and it’s supposed to be used by artists and writers to raise money to support specific artistic endeavors. Because I am out of my mind and don’t have a brain in my head, I have undertaken to write another novel, this one another thriller along the lines of Acts of the Apostles. It’s called “Creation Science”. So, today I launched a Kickstarter project to try to raise some $$ to support me as I do it.
As I documented in my kickstarter project blog, I’ve already had a near encounter with Murphy’s Law, but for the moment, (with some help from Wetmechanic in chief Gary Gray), things seem to be back on track. (Thanks, Gary!)
Below, my project description. But please do go to the kickstarter site, and if you have any love at all for me or even for Wetmachine, chip in a dollar or two. Even better, chip in a dollar or two & help me spread the word.
Creation Science, already about 1/4 written, is a technothriller about scary science– like designer DNA, brain hacking & mind control, computer viruses and biological viruses. It’s about the phony politics of the so-called war on terror, it’s about fundamentalism and anti-science, about transhumanism and hypercapitalism and other modern delusions, and it’s about decent people trying to save humanity from itself.In it you’ll find the stuff of all great thrillers: conspiracy, duplicity, double-crosses, dispensational Christian fascism, misunderstandings, confusions, car crashes, megalomaniacal villains (in and out of government), explosions, gunplay, Russian Mafias, neuroscience, coincidence, mysterious islands not far from Cape Cod, information theory, disease cowboys in Central Africa looking for the cause of Lassa Fever in the 1970’s, Jane’s Addiction, Mission of Burma, love, regret, remorse, nostalgia and sex. So Creation Science is a thriller. But it’s not just a thriller. Like many writers of thrillers, I get the science right and I get the technology right. But unlike most writers of thrillers, I aspire to create literature.
This is what Andrew Leonard of Salon said about my book “Acts of the Apostles”: “it’s also a book infused with a sensibility that you don’t normally expect a ”hard science fiction“ novel to have: real emotions, real heartbreak and a real sense of the craziness at the core of the human condition.” And that’s exactly what I’m going to try to put into Creation Science too.
I need money for two things: to pay my bills while I finish writing the thing, and to pay the printing costs of the book itself.
Because there are so many reviews of my books online (a good place to start is here ) & because the sources to the books themselves are online for free download, I think that with a little investigation you should be able to determine whether Creation Science is likely to be a book that would interest you. Or, you might check out my essays for Salon: How I Destroyed the New Economy tells how my taking part in the desecration of sacred ground on Martha’s Vineyard caused the dot com bubble to burst. In Artificial Stupidity I wrote about a funny spat between pretentious academic “AI” pundits and half-crazy hobbyists who outsmarted (or out-stupided?) them. In How I Decoded the Human Genome I described how my attempt to become a gasbag moral philosopher of the William Bennett variety nearly drove me around the bend (part two is here).
I’ve set my goal at $5,000 because if I can’t make at least that much, there’s no point in going forward. But certainly I’m hoping to do a lot better than that. It will take me four months at least to finish the writing–longer if I have to do day labor to bring in money. So please, help me get as much together as I can. It’s hard to sit down to thriller-writing after a day of driving a furniture van from Manhattan to Baltimore or from Bangor to Binghamton. I’ve done it, but I’d like to avoid doing it again.