Tuesday, October 15, 2019

The Brothers of Redemption (Technium, Book 1) by D.E. Murray

Release date: October 8, 2019
Subgenre: Dystopian fiction

About The Brothers of Redemption:

 

The Journey You Start Isn’t The One You Finish

It's 2165. The family is gone. The world is ruled by the ferociously competitive, hierarchical Council of the Brotherhood Orders. Sons are bred in cohorts created by Alphas and surrogates.

Half-brothers Jed and Max Kleer are middle-aged burnouts who share little except an Alpha and a mysterious, unbreakable bond.

When an abducted girl drops into Jed’s life, the brothers resolve to guide her home.

What could possibly go wrong?

Everything.

The journey they start won't be the one they finish.

Technium defies the conventions of the dystopian genre by combining romance, humor and lyrical meditations on the America that once was and might one day be. It consists of two books, The Brothers of Redemption, and A Daughter of Her People.

 

Excerpt:

 

NOS Standard Calendar: Sixday, 07.09.0093
(Old Calendar: Saturday, 7 September 2165)

East of the deepest and narrowest point of the river, where it hooked west and widened, stood an abandoned town, once called Cold Spring.

The river had had many names. The first peoples called it “The River That Flows Two Ways,” for between its banks ran two contending currents: fresh water from a lake in a wild mountain chain three hundred kilometers north, and salt water from the ocean ninety kilometers south. The peoples who came later named the river after their saints and kings and explorers, or for its location. Its final and longest-lasting name in the Before was the Hudson River. It was now called Waterway No. 1, Fresnel Zone 2.

On both banks, the land soared hundreds of abrupt, perpendicular meters from mudflats, marshes and talus fields into rugged glacial highlands cut by north-south valleys, covered with a thick canopy of oak and maple forest. A stark, glowering elevation on the west bank, its face scarred by a naked seam of rock, rough as elephant hide, guarded this bend like a sentinel.

Joshua Edward David Kleer—Jed Kleer—stood on the east side of the rocky shore, craning his neck upwards to locate a notch just below the peak of the forbidding elevation. Jed traced the seam with a finger to anchor his sight-lines, but every time he reached the summit, he lost his place in the encircling wreath of clouds and had to start again.

Volcanic eruptions had wiped out the summer, but the late September day had a moist, pearly softness and an undercurrent of warmth, faintly sensuous and thrilling. The seam of rock glistened from the humidity in the air.

The notch was named for an ancestor, the Dutch settler Patroon Johannes Van Kleer. Four centuries ago, Van Kleer rose from humble seaman in the Dutch West India Company to prosperous landowner, master of a farm and a brewery—or so Jed’s father had said. He had looked for them once; time had erased all traces of the farm and brewery, but it comforted him to believe the stories were true.

Jed was sure the notch was there, and searched intently, longingly, as if his wish to find it would bring it to sight, but every time his finger reached the summit the destination would vanish in a swirl of clouds. And the name of this mountain? Storm something . . . The harder he tried to summon the name, the more it eluded him, and he gave up. Perhaps he could sight the notch if he walked to the middle of the village, up Main Street, to higher ground, where the view was better. Still, he hesitated.

Good sense said not to go. This was a restricted zone, and he didn’t have a permit. He had not come to Cold Spring to sightsee. He came for one reason: to unearth the Drowned Lady from the place he had buried her…

 

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About D.E. Murray:

 In 2010, I read an article in Science Daily about the creation of "bipaternal" mice -- mice with two genetic fathers and no mother -- in the laboratory. I immediately said to myself, "Someone will write a book about this." Flash forward to three years later. No one had. So I decided to.

The book I ended up writing wasn't about bipaternal mice, it was about a human society in which artificial reproductive technology is used to create a ruling class. In other words, as a weapon of the powerful against the weak. What kind of society would that be?

This is my first novel. As I wrote, I encountered surprises, chief among them, the characters. They got into scrapes and muddles, made mistakes, took wrong turns, but in the end, they accomplished their mission.

In the process, they plunged headlong into confronting the past, a forbidden subject in their world, and developed deep and complex relationships that none knew they were capable of.

I am a native New Yorker who has lived in many places, worked many jobs and met many people. All of these experiences contributed to creating this book.

Enjoy the journey! 

 

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