Margaret & Doug Sharp's Channel Zilch Studios
Mick Oolfson shoots down his own astronaut career by stunt-flying a shuttle during re-entry. He’s miserable as a groundling so when testosterone-surfing geek goddess Heloise Chin offers him an astronaut gig on Channel Zilch, a pirate orbiting reality show, Mick jumps at the chance to return to space, though it means denting his Boy Scout scruples by swiping space shuttle Enterprise from the Smithsonian.
Launching Enterprise from Kazakhstan is a longer shot than relaunching Mick’s astronaut career, but to ride a rocket again he’ll tangle with the tomahawk-wielding ex-SEAL who heads NASA Security, tango with pistol-packing Nurse Motorcade, and tussle with the Russian Mafiya who infest Baikonur Cosmodrome. Mick’s joy at getting back to his beloved space curdles when Hel reveals that the reality show that was to fund their re-entry is a sham and that their real mission is to deploy Choirnet, a maternity/quarantine ward for an open source Singularity.
Channel Zilch is a 96k-word near-future sci-fi caper with heart and purpose, the first book of The Geek Rapture Project. CZ ranges from the utopian hubris of Singulatarians to NASA’s policy on cannibalism to the throbbing edge of erotobotics. Zilch is populated by a cast of sharply-etched oddballs such as pistol-packing fetish doll Nurse Motorcade and hypnotic newscaster Richard Head, who can make an oatmeal recipe sound like the biggest news since Madonna bore Limbaugh’s love child – just don’t call him Dick.
Hel's Bet: Book II of The Geek Rapture Project
Book 3 of The Geek Rapture Project is War on Death.
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My other projects are at Channel Zilch Studios.
GEEKS: Check out the OpenCog Open Source AGI Project