Guest Post
What makes your book different from any other book in this genre?
The Dark Court is book #2 in the Songs of the Sage book series. The book, and the series are unique in the sense that they imagine a near future in which language is no longer learned but streamed to brain implants—language chips. The purpose of the books is to reexamine the myth of the Tower of Babel, from the perspective of a high-tech future where language is controlled by powerful corporations, rather than being learned by humans.
The premise of the book series is that in the near future, smart AI and neuro-prosthetic technology, might render language learning obsolete—language is the hallmark of what it means to be human. Hence, when we lose language, we all lose.
The first book in the series, The Babel Apocalypse presents an apocalyptic event, a global language outage, that renders much of the population unable to communicate.
The second book, The Dark Court, set five years after the first, explores another apocalyptic event. It examines what happens when the very technology implanted in the brain, allowing us to communicate, is hacked.
The books explore the thesis that: “They who control language control everything.” And the books together examine how, within a landscape where entire populations have given up on language learning, for reasons of convenience, and hence must lease it back for monthly streaming subs, then these populations really are entirely dependent on big tech.
Five years after the Great Language Outage, lang-laws have been repealed, but world affairs have only gotten worse. The new automation agenda has resulted in a social caste system based on IQ. Manual employment is a thing of the past, and the lowest soc-ed class, the Unskills, are forced into permanent unemployment.
In a world on the brink of civil war, a deadly insomnia pandemic threatens to kill billions. Lilith King, Interpol’s most celebrated detective, is assigned to the case.
Together with a sleep specialist, Dr. Kace Westwood, Lilith must figure out who or what is behind this new threat. Could the pandemic be the result of the upskilling vagus chips being offered to the lowest soc-ed class? Or are language chips being hacked? And what of the viral conspiracy theories by the mysterious Dark Court, sweeping the globe? Lilith must work every possible angle, and quickly: she is running out of time!
While attempting to stop a vast conspiracy on an intergalactic scale, Lilith also faces shocking revelations about her origin, coming to terms with her own destiny
Excerpt
The next morning, I awoke in my hotel bed in a black mood, this time stirred up by the vestiges of the same goddamn nightmare. It was the feeling of being sucked backward through churning water. That’s what it felt like in the black dream, the one that imprisoned me, night after night. The Stygian darkness of my backward traveling struck with a petrifying chill. A malfunction of my body’s thermoreceptor system. I imagined death would feel just like that. The only way I could describe it. But no white lights. The blackness wasn’t like ordinary dark. It was the infinite purple blackness of a night completely devoid of stars, a moonless sky. So inky that you were sure you could see floating blotches of tarred nothingness, just like when you closed your eyes.
I don’t think Clyde really ever got it, that the sensation of drowning wasn’t just a feeling—in the sense of something imagined, a phantasm, an amygdala hijack. It was the actual feeling of a lived experience, something embodied at a deep level, emotionally rancid, cancerous, growing for twenty years; the feeling of being sucked backward through water in silent blackness. I always had this, these feelings. Intuitive, sensory, primordial. That’s what I did. I knew that’s what made me exceptional.
Dr. Vyvyan Evans is a native of Chester, England. He holds a PhD in linguistics from Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., and is a Professor of Linguistics. He has published numerous acclaimed popular scicles have appeared in numerous venues including 'The Guardian', 'Psychology Today', 'New Yoience and technical books on language and linguistics. His popular science essays and artrk Post', 'New Scientist', 'Newsweek' and 'The New Republic'. His award-winning writing focuses, in one way or another, on the nature of language and mind, the impact of technology on language, and the future of communication. His science fiction work explores the status of language and digital communication technology as potential weapons of mass destruction.
Book website (including ‘Buy’ links): http://www.songs-of-the-sage.com
Author website: https://www.vyvevans.net/
Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@vyvevans
Twitter: https://twitter.com/VyvEvans
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Vyvyan.Evans.Author
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nephilim_publishing/
Giveaway
Vyvyan Evans will award a randomly drawn winner paperback copies of both book 1 and book 2 of the series.
Thank you for hosting today.
ReplyDeleteI'm really looking forward to reading this book. Thanks for sharing.
ReplyDeleteThis book looks very interesting.
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