The Godhead Machine by Thomas Carpenter

The Godhead Machine is the second novel in Thomas Carpenter's Digital Sea series. In the first novel, we followed Zel Aurora across the planet as she sought the cure for her daughter's illness while evading capture by her former employer, the mysterious Djed.

Two years have passed. Zel's still on the run, though she tries to give her unappreciative adolescent daughter a normal life. An old foe, who she thought was dead, has resurfaced and is hunting her down. Running out of options, she joins the Wiki, but finds that the accompanying reality binder comes with its own perils.

The Wiki is an open source religion. You know about Wikipedia - where everyone can contribute to the building of the encyclopedia. In this case, members are trying to crowdsource their way to create the one true faith to get God's message. Unfortunately, there's too much of a social media aspect inherent to the Wiki that leaves it ripe for abuse and manipulation. When religious leaders are allowed to re-write the rules and twist the message, you're not dealing with spirituality anymore. You're preparing for war.

The other two major characters in the story are Sigh, an orphan girl living on the streets of London, and Nari, a pop megastar whose endorsements build fortunes for corporations and governments. Zel's fate becomes entwined with them. Carpenter keeps us hooked through their predicaments.

While I've read stories where the protagonist was female, I think this is the first novel I've read where all of the major characters were women. Men were relegated to the roles of minor characters and villains, not that he bashes them in a fit of self-loathing. It just so happens that these are three strong, diverse women who are masters of the worlds they inhabit. When forced to deal with adversity outside their domain, their resourcefulness enables them to persevere.

Carpenter's writing has matured. While I enjoyed, The Digital Sea, The Godhead Machine shows a definite improvement. His writing is tighter and more focused. There is no filler here. Action is sparse, but well-utilized. Carpenter would rather have his characters survive by their wits than violence. The dialogue moves the story along at a good pace and is effective at revealing the nature of the characters. Carpenter efficiently weaves the three storylines together, discarding anything that doesn't develop the characters or contribute to the plot.

Carpenter's augmented reality novels are building his reputation as a skilled writer in the new generation of cyberpunk novelists. So before you buy your Google Glasses at the end of the year, be sure to check out his work to see where the future is taking us.

The Godhead Machine is available in various formats through the author's website.

Mirror Shards Anthology

Mirror Shards is a short story anthology published by Black Moon Books, the imprint of indie author, Thomas K. Carpenter. This time around, Carpenter serves as both author (he contributed one story) and editor. He accepted submissions from unpublished and published authors.

Much like Carpenter's novel, The Digital Sea (which was reviewed in this blog earlier this year), the stories in this anthology all have augmented reality (AR) as a common element integral to each story. However, how each author incorporates AR into their story is as varied as the authors themselves. It would be difficult to provide a detailed analysis of all 13 stories so I will provide a taste of each.

We're shown how a submarine pilot guides a gaggle of tourists in the depths of the Indian Ocean in "The Watcher" and jacked in with a bio-engineered assassin dropped on a distant ring world in "El Matador".

AR is a positive force that advances the effectiveness of smart detectives in "Witness Protection" while helping a young woman survive an encounter with a crime syndicate in the cold of eastern Russia in "Of Bone and Steel and Other Soft Materials". It enables a singer to adopt new personas while Earth is under the boot of alien overlords in "Stage Presence, Baby". And it enables revolutions in the corporate dictatorship of "Gift Horses".

The darker side of AR is explored as well. It is used to bring about an advertizing apocalypse in "Below the Bollocks Line" and adds a new dimension to imprisonment in "The Sun is Real." It fosters the ugliness of narcissism in "A Book By Its Cover".

Some stories balance the two. It props up the ego of the actors in "These Delicate Creatures" but also restores their humanity when art becomes protest. And in the sexual slavery of "More Real Than Flesh" it provides an escape hatch.

I have to say that there isn't a bad story in the bunch but I was still able to pick out two stellar stories that rose above the rest: "Music of the Spheres" and "The Cageless Zoo".

"Music of the Spheres" is probably the best math story I've ever read. A math major helps his sister with her geometry homework and it doesn't come across as dull, instead it turns into a lesson she has to teach him later in life. The underlying theme is about what happens to those who are left behind when AR takes over society. The author, Ken Liu, poignantly shows how one can cope with watching dreams die.

My favorite is Carpenter's own, "The Cageless Zoo", which is about a widow and her two children visiting a zoo full of predators who are kept from eating people by AR implants. The mother is confronted by a zoo official who demands a copy of her late husband's research, which she doesn't want to surrender for fear of it being buried by the Darwin Institute. Not only does Carpenter's story present us with a unique use for AR but it provides us with an excellent demonstration for how epigenetics could work in nature on a fictional beast. But forgetting the science for a moment, it was a fun read along the lines of Jurassic Park, but without the dinosaurs.

Carpenter has amassed a diverse collection of highly entertaining and thought provoking AR stories in Mirror Shards, Volume 1. As with all good anthologies, I now have another list of talented writers whose works I can explore further. I look forward to the next installment of this series. Highly recommended for all sci-fi fans.

Mirror Shards is available in print and ebook formats through the publisher's website.

The Digital Sea by Thomas Carpenter

The world is a bleak place in Thomas Carpenter's The Digital Sea. Rising sea levels, changes in climate, dwindling resources and overpopulation have forced governments to enact population reduction laws and trade in population bonds. But a global one child policy isn't working fast enough for some, leading them to consider more drastic measures.

Escapism via augmented reality (AR), what people refer to as the Digital Sea, is very popular. Whether accessed via glasses or “mods”, surgically implanted neural networks, people are able to wallpaper over the despair and ruin to see a rosier reality. Or you can observe what's others have projected over themselves and their surroundings. It's geocaching taken to a whole new level. Unfortunately, just as opening an email attachment may introduce a virus to your computer, accepting someone's AR program may grant them permanent control over your perception of reality.

Zel Aurora has a daughter who is deathly ill. Fortunately, Zel is highly skilled at parting the waters of the Digital Sea to reveal what people try to hide. And she can use it to wash away her tracks. For this, she receives enough money to acquire the medical equipment and medicines to keep her daughter alive, albeit barely. They've also been on the run from a former employer, the Djed, who Zel spurned. Tired of running, and her daughter in desperate need of better treatment, Zel decides to return to his employ, hoping that his desire to use her skills overrules his anger.

Besides Zel, there are several other characters that figure prominently in the story. I wondered how well Carpenter was going to tie their individual storylines together, but he pulled it off. Even though he shifts around a lot, at no point did I forget who any of them were. Carpenter deftly shapes and defines all of his characters, providing us with a diverse group. He deserves credit for writing a story where one major character is an amputee and another suffers from Asperger's Syndrome, yet neither falls prey to stereotypes.

While The Digital Sea is well written, it could have used an editor's oversight. Overall, Carpenter does a good job self-editing but nobody's perfect. Typos got past him (“too” and “to” swapped, “artic” instead of “arctic”, missing verbs) and there were times when there were too many short, choppy sentences and fragments. An editor would've helped to catch the mistakes and offer suggestions to improve the flow of the narrative.

But despite my complaints, The Digital Sea is a good story. There's plenty of intrigue to captivate the reader's attention. The characters challenge the reader in that it's not a good versus evil situation. They're just pawns on opposing sides, trying to eke out a living in a difficult world. It will be interesting to see where Carpenter goes from here with this series.

Links to purchase The Digital Sea and other works by Thomas Carpenter may be found on his website.