About Bubbleonia Rising:
“I’d like to know just what you are Not that I care what you’re going through I’d like to think that the distance between us Is relative to time and dimension.”
I came at this all wrong.
In 2011, I wrote a soundtrack for the end of the world and no one came out for it. The sky didn’t fall and the walls held fast, even as we pushed at them through sheer force of will.
Later, in 2015, I wrote the book. In fact, I wrote three of them. The first was about Froyd Frink – a junkie performance artist with a taste for an illegal drug called Enigma-27x.
Froyd has always been a loser. He wasn’t born ‘cool’ and never had much in the way of social credibility. He gets mixed up in a murder investigation in a city on the edge of Saturn’s rings. He defies his classification and sabotages his own allotment – a cocktail of legal drugs, specifically tailored to his role in Bubbleonian society, his core personality and his genome.
He comes to believe that his drug of choice is actually a sentient alien pro-virus. He’s more than a little paranoid.
The second story was about a dead astronaut who gets stranded in an artificial afterlife. Portions of this tale play out in Froyd’s ‘comic book’ collection, during the interludes between Froyd’s three acts.
The third is a tale of Red Karma, a fluffy 15-year-old, natural born human who travels into the future, resists a techno-Utopian cabal, surfs gravity wells and thwarts an alien agenda so monstrous – none in Bubbleonia see it coming straight at them, behind the curtains.
Along the way, Froyd takes a guru – the horny (and holy!) ‘Busker-King’ Muah Hahadem. He runs afoul of Tzakapotek Jones – a designated spokesmodel for a political group called ‘the sponsors’ who manage the boring parts of reality, program the ad-sky and make sure that the LEV runs on time.
When Froyd comes clean to police detective Graf Baelys while under interrogation in the Landon mechanism – they both discover a truth that threatens to shake the city to its foundations. The question is: can either of them make anyone else see it in time to stop the collapse?
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My story is unique for two reasons. I wrote the soundtrack first, with the help of longtime musical collaborator, Skot Pollok. Click here to see what none of the fuss was about: https://soundcloud.com/coeh/sets/us-against-ourselves
I wrote the stories next, which lends the whole thing a quasi-Dickian vibe. Isn’t (infinite) novelty fun?
The other reason my tale deserves your attention and support is this: I am putting it up on Inkshares for the Nerdist Science Fiction contest so that you – my possible readers – may interact with it as it moves from three drafts toward an essential narrative.
Imagine a world in the not-so-distant future where artificial intelligence makes a real difference, but deliberately chooses the shittiest jobs possible.
Contemplate a human-like civilization on the edge of entertainment hedonism, crumbling under the weight of its own history and the inertia of its own freedom.
Visualize a time in space where skin, sex, gender and species are pure cosplay. Where genes are edited from a menu of options according to your preferences, and the matrix is all on the outside.
If you see any of my characters in real life, tell them to get in touch, ASAP.
“Fix your heart on a shooting star and it’s ours.”
--Derek
https://dereklgregory.com/