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And then I realized I’d hit all these plot points in my first Sci Fi novel, Zero Hour.
Longtime readers will remember that I originally serialized Zero Hour in this very newsletter in 2009. The initial impulse to write it came from a randomly generated prompt, and as I was reading it aloud with the caveat that it certainly couldn’t work…the story started bubbling up in my writer brain and demanded to be told.
This is a gross-out story. This story is about an organized spy, a comic, and an artificial life form. It starts in a coffee shop. The religion of the world will turn out not to be what it seems.
Eventually I stopped trying to shoehorn in the “comic,” though you could argue the character Audrey inadvertently provides pretty good comic relief. I get a big kick out of how innocently gleeful she is whenever someone gets hurt. And I didn’t go out of my way to make it a gross-out story, though the feeding shunts in the characters’ arms are fairly nasty, and I didn’t hold back when the main character Ernest eventually encountered the gruesome Reclaim machine. The “organized spy” became the love interest Will, the artificial life form took shape as artificial intelligence L0U15E, the religion of the world became the magnetic soul theory, and the coffee shop was…a coffee shop.
Zero Hour developed into a unique mashup of Logan’s Run, The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland and Soylent Green. As innocently unlike my typical protagonists as Ernest turned out, I felt his authenticity and determination held a certain appeal.
If you’re interested in revisiting Zero Hour—or in reading it for the first time—you can find it at all the usual places.
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