Free books!
You read that right. Free books. My three books, to be precise. I have decided to put them out to share with the interweb because I am feeling generous and want to improve my Karma. Also, I would like some reviews. If you like Science Fiction or Travel Writing, please have a look. Here is a brief intro:
Cooperworld – In the near future, AI research is strictly controlled by paranoid governments. When a renowned Artificial Intelligence expert illegally decides to create digital life in an simulated universe, he doesn’t at first realise the implications of what he has done. Implications not just for him, but for everyone.
In this short story, I have a light-hearted but fairly philosophical look at what constitutes consciousness and how we perceive reality. Humorous in some parts and deep in others. This is a 17,000 word story.
Australia, Morocco, and Thailand: Three true travel tales – These three true stories of fairly perilous travel. Here are what they are roughly about:
While backpacking in my early twenties, I thought I’d give fruit picking a go. Even without the spiders, snakes, and a plague of locusts, things turn out pretty badly.
A trip into the Atlas Mountains with my girlfriend turns out less than romantic when flash floods threaten to wipe out the town. The only escape option is a van full of Berber tribesmen and a waterlogged road on the edge of a cliff.
After moving to the peaceful paradise of Thailand, I pop to the local pub in Bangkok. That evening there is a military coup. In Bangkok. So why can’t I see anything?
These stories are filled with humour and dollops of fear. Recommended for those who enjoy travel stories or just like reading about someone being mildly terrified in foreign countries.
The Uneven Passage of Time – When I was thinking of trying out writing on Kindle, I went through my short stories and found three that were linked by the idea of ‘Time’. So I published them. Here is the description:
Stephen Hawking once sent out dinner invitations to all future time travellers. No one turned up. But what if one had? In ‘A Date to Remember’ a young physicist is convinced he has worked out the secret to building a time travel device. Lacking the resources to construct the machine he sets a time and date for a meeting with his future self.
It is a truism that people remember the big events in life and forget the repetitive. For most people, their year skips by unnoticed, punctuated by birthdays, world events, big personal milestones or traumatic events. As you age life seems to speed up and you find that the years seem to fly past. ‘As Time Goes By’ is the story of Frank Gilbert who is experiencing this to the extreme. His time seems to be accelerating at an abnormal rate. Years of his repetitive life seem to go by in days. Can he break the cycle in time?
The final and longest short story is ‘The Man Who Loved Statues’. Captain Michael Pike is a man who has taken a bit of hammering in life. With nothing much to live for he volunteers for an experiment that is going to attempt to alter his passage through time and put him in stasis. Things don’t go quite according to plan.
