Prolongment by Grace Eyre
Genre: science-fiction
Publisher: Curiosity Quills Press
Date of Publication: December 5th 2013
Cover Artist: Ricky Gunawan
HYPERLINK "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19150910-prolongment" Goodreads
Purchase Links: HYPERLINK "http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00H3WPWN8/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=curioquill-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00H3WPWN8" Amazon | HYPERLINK "http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/prolongment-grace-eyre/1117562629" Barnes & Noble | HYPERLINK "http://store.kobobooks.com/en-US/ebook/prolongment" Kobo
Description:
To fund their controversial Time research, B&E Labs patented a medical process called "Prolongment", in which very old and very wealthy clients can pay to have their consciousness extended past death.
The process of Prolongment works by projecting the client’s consciousness (called a "replica mind") into the future, past the point of death. When time is up, the replica mind is returned to the client, filling them with new memories. Postmortem memories. Memories of the future.
B&E Labs has many enemies. Now the city is besieged with non-corporeal beings, more commonly known as ghosts. Some of these ghosts have a vengeance. B&E is under charges of corruption, and their services are seen as a threat to physical safety and the integrity of the space-time continuum.
Prolongment touches all inhabitants of the city, from a vigilante journalist to a haunting victim, from a wealthy client to a rogue scientist experimenting with her own mind. Above all, Prolongment weighs on the conscience of B&E’s CEO, Dr. Ken Muerta, whose moral code grows murkier as he struggles to hold the company together. The fate of the living, the dead, and Time itself is in his hands.
About the Author:Grace is a writer and a video editor who lives in Sydney, Australia with her partner Ezra and her cat Coco.
Her life’s loves include spicy food, oceans, cats, experimental film, books, comics, and epic television. She is mildly afraid of flying and car crashes.
All other facts about Grace are fleeting at best.
Find Grace Eyre Online:
HYPERLINK "http://graceeyre.com/" Website | HYPERLINK "https://twitter.com/TheGraceEyre" Twitter | HYPERLINK "https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7011935.Grace_Eyre" Goodreads
GUEST POST BY GRACE EYRE
Hey there blogosphere,
When people ask me about Prolongment, my semi-dystopian science-fiction ghost-story, I usually talk either about technology or death. The technology is kind-of a cobbled together rendering of the real science you’d read about in wired, and death, well, it’s an interesting topic. Especially when the chronology of death is turned inside out, as it is in this book.
Today, however, I want to talk about something else: the women.
I got this comment on Amazon, and I was really proud of it.
"What I probably enjoyed most about this book is that there are female characters with stories unrelated to their love life. How novel!"
How novel indeed! I didn’t specifically intend to give women complex inner lives, but that’s what happened! How was this miracle achieved?
In most respects the world of Prolongment is meant to be realistic. Therefore, I based people and settings off the real world. The real world is roughly half men and half women. Women say and do as many things as men say and do, give or take. It’s funny, how simple the concept is, yet how rarely it’s reflected in fiction.
There is also no romance in Prolongment, unless you count an old married couple and a possible love/hate (mostly hate) connection between two top scientists, who flirt with each other about as much as I would flirt with a huntsman spider. That is because many things happen in the real world without people falling in love, or with people falling in love but not doing anything about it.
In light of this, I’d like to talk, sans romance, about two women: Emily and Ellen.
Emily and Ellen are fundamentally decent people who sincerely dislike each other. Emily is a journalist just trying to do her job. Her general attitude of appeasement toward B&E Labs makes her the only journalist allowed in the inner circle. While she’s privately critical of the company, she (rightly in my opinion) thinks most of the charges levied against B&E are no more than petty politics and corporate thuggery. She makes a bad decision now and then, and her fluff pieces for B&E don’t exactly make her a hero. But there she is, doing the best she can with what she has, and I don’t blame her.
Ellen is a genius and a partner in B&E, and she’s colossally unhappy with the direction of the company. Unfortunately, she can’t leave because her knowledge of the future could disrupt the space-time continuum. That’s a tough contract to get out of! At first she tries to negotiate her path within the company, but then she gives up and becomes very angry. Her anger settles in and becomes part of her personality. That big, hyper-intelligent, angry, aggressive, reckless and righteous personality becomes one of biggest threats B&E.
So there you have it, two women at cross-purposes with each other. Neither one is bad.
Emily is a protector of B&E, Ellen is a saboteur. Emily is stuck on the outside wanting to get in. Ellen is stuck on the inside wanting to get out.
That brings me to the last point I want to make. Just like people in the real world, people in the world of Prolongment are neither explicitly good nor explicitly bad. For the most part, they’re just flawed. Fiction is at it’s most exciting, intriguing, and thoughtful when you aren’t told who to root for.
I’d like to know where you stand.
Thanks Grace for taking over today! It a pleasure to have you here at The Book Review
