Thursday, December 11, 2014

Zoot's Roots by Geronimo Bosch

Release date: November 22, 2014
Subgenre: Dystopian, Science Fiction, Cyberpunk

About Zoot's Roots

The child genius, Dane Roys, leads an interesting life inventing new gadgets for his father's auto repair shop. Nicknamed Zoot by his dad, Dane has big plans for his future and, at 10 years old, already feels constrained by the limits of the family trade. Zoot dreams of harnessing the energy of rotating galaxies and bending spacetime to enable interstellar travel. He yearns for the fame of proving himself the world's greatest living genius.
To achieve his aims, Zoot believes in removing obstacles from his path.
Richter, a charismatic underworld operator, sees in Zoot great potential which might be manipulated to meet his own power-hungry needs. So begins the luring of the child prodigy from the loving protection of parental guidance. But, will flying the family nest and hooking up with an underworld outfit really help Zoot to realise the dreams of his youthful genius, or will it merely place further obstacles in his path?

Excerpt:

Dane felt like the big mang, sitting in the rear of the stretch Gazoota, hanging with the cool crew; he felt like Zoot. And this was what it was all about...
Richter tipped the wink to Beebs in the hot seat, who gave their impressionable passenger a textbook demonstration on how to flout the laws of the Grid: They ran ragged freestyle through the Auto Streams, careering across intersects, living more than dangerously; they harassed and harried respectabloids, making the labrats fearful of skidjacking; they ‘buzzed Boogla Babes’, which Zoot took to mean making women in Floaters notice them; they flipped it and spun it and didn’t care who saw them do it; OldsMobiles were tailspun in their wake; Family wagons were terrorised – Zoot caught sight of a couple of little darlings around his own age and younger, clinging to each other as the Freaks roared by screaming out obscenities, and he joined in too, loving every minute of it. And the Freaks got wilder and wilder, as the skidoo filled up with sweet-smelling vapours. And there was tussling in the back between grown adults, as stuff got thrown about and the place became a right state. And everyone found it utterly hilarious... Zoot found it hilarious too.
But, that was about all he remembered, until waking up back at the hangar with a devastating headache and his Father trying to feed him water while looking all concerned.
Of course, Zoot’s Dad wanted to know the whole story: “Tell me everything that happened, son...”
Well, Zoot was hardly going to tell his old mang what a hoot it had been. And, in the event, the boy couldn’t speak anyway, not without slurring his words and breaking out into giggling fits – So that was that. Zoot didn’t know, and much less probably cared, that the old mang was mortally enraged...
There was no more hanging out and working at the hangar for young Dane – Graf laid down the law: “There’s a lesson to be learned here, son. And I care enough about your prospects that it is going to be learned – Even if it has to be learned the hard way...”
...What was it with his Dad and ‘the hard way’...couldn’t they just cut through all that crap?
Fortunately for Zoot, he knew a man who could.
Doing things the easy way and cutting through the crap was more than just second nature for a mang of Ric’s pedigree; it was his raison d’être.
And what had he been grooming the kid genius for, anyway...? Certainly not to be warned off by some righteous dude, law-abiding (labrat) grease monkey, without the sense even to make overtures to an Outfit for protection before finding himself leaned on from all sides. It was usually the way with labrats, Ric knew from experience: They got no hustle about them, so they expect you to leave yours by the door on the way in; thinking life’s a whorly and everybody gets their turn – Well, good look with that, greenhorns... and don’t mind me if I piss on your corpse in the gutter; it’s just the way things are, Joe, it’s just the way things are...
So, when Graf Roys thought that he’d call the arch-manipulator’s bluff by taking Dane out of the equation, all he really succeeded in doing was to prove to the man they called ‘SeisRic’ his inexperience in negotiations of this nature.
And, as you might imagine, the gangland fixer was about three steps ahead of the legitimate businessman.

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About Geronimo Bosch


Some of my best ideas arrive when I'm sleeping.

You know the type: Some clown with a melted face offers me a bag of jelly beans that contains the whole damn Multiverse; each one I eat is me chomping down an entire Universe... this one's sweet... and this one's really bitter. That one tasted like gorgonzola!

And it's not as if the clown has any qualms about this senseless devouring of reality... I ask the freak: "What happens when I eat the Universe that we're in right now...?"

And, the weirdo just looks at me with eyes that have seen too much of the heart of every star; have been baked hard, then melted, and ultimately screwed - and he says to me, this Dream Peddler, he says, "Aaah, there you go laddie: we're in all of them, at the same time, for all of eternity..."

Then, he starts to laugh, maniacally, in the manner of someone who's been given far too much adulation for far too long, and when I look again into the bag of jelly beans, I realise that I've been eating pellets of dung all along.

That sort of thing.

I like to channel a sense of dream absurdity and multi-textural reality into the high-octane, psychedelia of the dystopian, cyberpunk sci-fi that I write. It seems to me an adequate form for satirising the sheer, unbridled lunacy of life on Earth as a human in the 21st century.

Because if you forget to smile and laugh, you go mad...

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