Release date: August 28, 2018
Subgenre: Dystopian fiction, Science fiction thriller
About Missing Signal:
From Seb Doubinsky, author of The Song of Synth, The Babylonian Trilogy, White City, Absinth, Omega Gray and Suan Ming, comes his highly anticipated next installment in the City-States Cycle.
Missing Signal―a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside a government conspiracy? Agent Terrence Kovacs has worked for the New Petersburg Counter-Intel Department propagating fake UFO stories for so long that even he has a hard time separating fact from fiction. Especially when he’s approached by a beautiful woman named Vita, who claims she’s been sent from another planet to liberate Earth.
Excerpt:
Terrence sat down at his desk, putting his coffee next to the
computer keyboard. He looked at the screen and his mind drifted to
chapter four. If Terrence ever had to choose a chapter number for
his life right now, it would have been four. Not quite the
beginning. Not even the beginning of the beginning: the possibility
of something happening in the next chapters, long before the end.
But he was 39 now, and he felt he was way beyond chapter four.
Probably more like eleven or twelve. So four was wishful thinking.
And it might become nostalgia soon. Sighing, he returned to his
notes. Sometimes he let his mind drift too much.
***
Terrence’s office was small, located at the end of the corridor in
the C.I.D. building, which was situated on the Pappy Boyington Air
Force Base on the outskirts of New Petersburg. It was kind of
gloomy, with a single chair, a small metal desk for his laptop, no
window and a single bookshelf. Perfect for the job, actually. The
walls were painted a dull pigeon gray, and the only splash of color
was a poster of Antonioni’s Blow-Up. He had seen the movie once on his computer and had loved it,
because of its beautiful emptiness, which he felt mirrored his own.
Terrence seldom worked there, as he was in the field a lot, on
special assignments. He even missed it, sometimes.
***
The notes consisted mostly of a list of websites. A long one. Some
were crossed out. Inactive or deactivated. The latter thanks to
Terrence, generally. He often thought of himself as a “trickster,”
these old gods or half-gods that could never be fully trusted or
relied on—Loki and Coyote were the most famous, but there were
many, many of them. Always changing face, always offering poisoned
help. His personal email was ulysses@np.net. The greatest trickster
of them all. And he was a man. A human being, working for his
beloved City-State, like Terrence did. Exactly like Terrence did.
Sometimes he imagined being interviewed for a magazine.
Q: Is it difficult to work as a trickster? I mean, nobody really
likes you, nobody trusts you; you have no real
friends . . .
A: No, it’s not difficult at all. It’s fun. A lot of fun. I like to
have fun alone. It’s the best. Look at me: I’m laughing. I’m alone,
and I’m laughing.
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About Seb Doubinsky:
Seb Doubinsky is a bilingual writer born in Paris in 1963. His
novels, all set in a dystopian universe revolving around competing
cities-states, have been published in the UK and in the USA. He
currently lives with his family in Aarhus, Denmark, where he
teaches at the university.
About Meerkat Press:
Meerkat Press is an independent publisher committed to finding and
publishing exceptional, irresistible, unforgettable fiction. And despite
the previous sentence, we frown on overuse of adjectives and adverbs in
submissions. *smile*
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