today, Friday the 14th June 2013, Free Planet¹ CUSTODIAN has been published on Amazon Kindle (buy now), various other ebook formats (buy now) and paperback format (buy now). Many thanks to (my editor, format guru and BFGS co-writer) Alex Severin who ensured that this 82,000 words novel was the best it could be.
What's Free Planet¹ CUSTODIAN about?
A group of Oxford University's finest minds, the eponymous Custodians, offer mankind a technological 'get out of jail free card' enabling them to slip from under the yoke of Corporate Slavery to THE INDUSTRY.
Radical elements within the student body engage themselves in the Patent Wars and start a TV show called Natural Lottery that broadcasts to the global Evertainment System, every night, 7-9 p.m., all channels, full spectrum dominance.
You are taken through a physical relocation of your corporate arm of The Industry from Dusseldorf to Oxford. You are 'made redundant' in the most spectacular public fashion and your world starts to (literally) crumble, or pixellate, around you.
Scene from the Opening Chapter:
Asalah Al Faghori will die tonight and we shall share the moment of her passing so that she can fulfill her promise of a brand-new future so far denied the inhabitants of this cruelly commercial world.
She will die so that you the people can understand Creativity.
She will die so that you the people can translate Passion.
She will die so that you the people can share Kinship.
She's not going to die strapped to a chair receiving four hundred stab wounds from some 'lunatic home invader' like unlucky French biochemists. She's not going to be discovered in some GCHQ safe house, zipped into a locked pink sports bag, decomposed well beyond the few days since her demise. She's not going to be discovered with her wrists slit in the wrong way, undigested paracetamol in her gut and no blood near her corpse in the woods.
And from a Later Chapter:
1) You have to clear a human turd off your desk. Not a toy one. Not some practical joke piece of moulded plastic. This is a real human turd. Someone would have had to squat down, right there on your desk before you got in, to lay this length of steaming brown pipe. You can even see where the anus muscle has crimped off the tail of it, begging like a clever puppy, its front-paw in the air.
2) The email flag pops up cheerily and it's a collection for your funeral. Enough money has already been pledged to buy quite a nice casket. Seriously, that is not right.
