Books

Books
Books written by Ray Sullivan

Saturday 30 April 2011

DLF is published

I had a big push this week on DLF and published it just after the Royal couple tied the knot.  It's up on Amazon now but I'm still waiting for it to appear on Smashwords.

Here's the blurb:




In 1978, meteorites striking a remote part of the Mojave desert preceded severe disruption to all radio frequencies in the California district. The disruption was mistakenly believed to be a Soviet sleeper cell mobilising or a Middle Eastern terrorist attack on the US. It was triangulated to the last known location of a bunch of oil roughnecks drilling in the desert and the US military intervened, with a massive loss of innocent life. The cause of the disruption is now known to be DLFs,

DLFs (microscopic, bacteria-like Digital Life Forms) have been landing on Earth for Millennia, clinging to meteorites, looking for the right conditions to thrive. To DLFs electrons are like oxygen, silicon is like food and computer code is their DNA. Since the middle of the 20th Century we have all benefitted from DLFs, without which there wouldn’t be Plasma TVs, microwave ovens or iPhones. But DLFs have to be carefully managed and controlled. Given free rein they will take over and modify electronic equipment in the most unpredictable way. Consequently there has built up a massive, secret international industry manipulating DLFs so that they produce the right products for modern consumers while ensuring DLFs don't disrupt the international infrastructures such as the electricity grid or the Internet, an industry that is policed by a secretive arm of the United Nations.

Royston, a post graduate geologist from the University of Manchester inadvertently becomes embroiled in the secret, dangerous world of DLFs and rapidly finds himself on the run behind the wheel of a drive-by-wire, rally specification Subaru infected with the strongest and most adaptable DLF ever discovered. He is being pursued by Winston Grace, an ex FBI, now UN agent in a Maserati sports tourer, an Apache gunship, a Chinook bearing eight SAS soldiers and two Hawk jet fighters. And that’s just the good guys. If they catch him, he may live. If they don’t, then there are more ruthless people on his tail, too, as he tries to evade capture in a world that doesn’t value human life and where the stakes are as high as can be imagined, in an industry that lives by just two mottos:

Life ain’t fair

and

Sh!t happens
The listing includes my son in law, Adam Griffiths as he produced the cover

so many thanks to Ad for that.

Monday 25 April 2011

Source Code and Parallel Lives

Just been to see Source Code at the cinema.  About halfway through the film I realised that I was watching a cinematic variation of Parallel Lives.  Sure, the location is different (set in my favourite city, Chicago), and the way of accessing parallel universes is different also, but the basic premise is the same.  It's a different story, and very well made too, but the similarities stunned me.  Although Parallel Lives has been kicking around in home printed form since I finished it in early 2004 I have no doubt this is just a case of two individuals coming up with the same idea, but I'm truly glad I that I self published in January, otherwise I would have had one heck of a job convincing people that Parallel Lives was an original piece of work.

If you haven't seen Source Code yet then do try and catch it, it's a really good film.  And if you enjoyed the concept, please take a look at Parallel Lives.

DLF is finished.  I'm just letting it lie for a while before reading through it one more time.  If it looks and reads well on that read through then I'll publish it.  Adam Griffiths has designed and produced the book cover and I think it's pretty neat.

I'm working through a book I started a little while back, provisionally titled 'Assassin'.  In it a man who kills for reward sits out a storm with a beach bum, and inadvertantly reveals his calling.  Naturally the beach bum isn't too keen to sleep once he knows the killer's profession, so the Assassin decides to pass the time explaining how he got to be a killer from a background in engineering.  It's set a little in the future in a Britain that has no democratic govenment and where the country is isolated from the rest of the world.  It's about 20% complete so it's far from certain it will be completed, but I'll keep you posted.

After a three week period when none of my books sold a single copy, I've just had a mini rush this weekend with both Skin and The Journeymen suddenly starting to sell again.  In fact I've just sold a copy of Skin in the US, so some people are stumbling across my books somehow.