Book Reviews

Bubblequake: Book 3 of the Disposable Soma Trilogy

The year is 2180, and former Senator Jim Liu has switched parties and is now running for president as a Republican. Battling chronic pain, he faces an uphill election battle as his resistance to joining World War Four puts him at odds with most members of his party. Things get more complicated when Jim’s long lost sociopathic brother surfaces, he receives an ear in the mail, and many of the bubbles that America relies on for food, housing, and industry are destroyed in a cascading bubblequake. Adding to the mystery and confusion, strange blue individuals, speaking an unfamiliar language, emerge from an unregistered bubble, leaving society in bewildered disarray.

Book Reviews

Psittacide: Book 2 of the Disposable Soma Trilogy

The 2172 election is soon approaching. The incumbent, authoritarian President Silas Blackwolf, has had his vice president arrested in order to prevent her from invoking the 25th amendment and removing him from office. Now with the election coming up, he has to choose a running mate. His conspiring cabinet steers him toward selecting moderate senator and former presidential grandson Jim Liu. Through Byzantine constitutional logic, the only way Jim can defeat Blackwolf is by helping him win the race.
The plan gets more complicated when a deadly plague begins to spread among the nation’s genetically enhanced, super-intelligent parrots. The only cure is a plant that grows on Centos Island, which currently lies in the middle of an international war zone. Jim finds himself increasingly compromised, as he makes one ethical compromise after another in his struggle to protect the country from Blackwolf.

Book Reviews

The Disposable Soma: Book 1 of the Disposable Soma Trilogy

The year is 2164 and politics has become unrecognizable. Democrats have become conservative, Republicans have become liberal, and an upstart party called the Empathy Party blames all the world’s ills on sociopaths. An assassination leaves the Empathy Party’s candidacy wide open and a clown car of candidates vies for the nomination. One, hotel heir and failed comedian Jim Liu, stands out from the others when he chooses a genetically modified, super-intelligent, opium-addicted parrot as his running mate. This book follows his quest to become the Empathy Party’s nominee for the 2164 presidential election. His campaign takes him through an America where most days are public holidays, psychedelic drug use is widespread, and the last uncontacted people on Earth are the unknowing subjects of a reality show whose fans have tuned it into a new religion.

Book Reviews

Cousin Calls

A college student reluctantly attends a family chili cookout that turns into a never ending nightmare. A man desperate for job skills uses a brain implant to help him learn, but it malfunctions and leaves him sexually attracted to shadows. A private investigator is hired to discover who keeps befouling the walls of convenience store bathrooms. Two deer engaged in combat find that they are unable to unlock from one another’s antlers after the fight is over. A single mother spends 2020 battling an evil landlord, a fascist neighbor, national political chaos, and a global pandemic. These are the strange stories told by regulars at the local bar on Christmas Eve, stories which each began with a phone call from someone who announced “you don’t know me, but we’re cousins.”