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LUKE KENNARD’S SCI-FI NOVELLA AVAILABLE FREE ON KINDLE 1-5 APRIL
“It is 2031 and the must-have gadget is the Holophin: a tiny, dolphin-shaped microprocessor which cures your worst impulses and phobias, comforts you in your grief or boredom and makes everything look much, much prettier.”
Holophin is the debut novella by award-winning British poet LUKE KENNARD – originally released in September 2012 as a limited edition hardback by London-based indie press Penned in the Margins.
From Monday 1 April to Friday 5 April 2013, Holophin will be available to download totally free from Amazon Kindle.
As publisher Tom Chivers explains, “the hardback edition sold out incredibly quickly – I literally have one copy left in the office – so we’re making Holophin available for free in order that more people can get hold of this mind-blowing and very funny satire of the near future.”
The heroes of the story are Hatsuka and Max, students at the esteemed Takin International School, a learning institute so magnificent it produces Holophins as a by-product of its coursework projects. The billionth device has just been sold, but when Takin’s best students are stalked by a shady rival manufacturer, Holophin’s monopoly, and the narrative itself, begins to unravel – with unexpected consequences.
Holophin is a meditation on identity and the imagination, but also offers a veiled satire of certain consumer technology brands. As Kennard says:
“I wanted to write a story about technology and memory, but I wanted to focus on the marketing side, the kind of thing you see played out between Apple and Samsung, and the way we take sides, as if either is any more evil/ethical. But it’s not surprising that we try to bring in a moral dimension, because when you think about how long we all spend fiddling obsessively with their devices, they’re kind of battling for our souls: our means of experiencing the world, of communicating with one another. So, what if there were rival companies offering to make you a soul – how would you choose?”
Critics and readers alike have praised Holophin: The Telegraph’s Science Fiction critic David Langford dubbed it “a sparky, image-rich novella that reboots familiar genre themes”, whilst literary blog Gists & Piths responded with, “wonderful reading, imaginatively fresh, technically surprising... It deserves to sell millions.”
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Please note: the Editors of G&P do not endorse Amazon, nor the Kindle device. Actually, one of the editors is a bit pissed off that his Kindle's screen went wrong just after the warranty collapsed. He considers it badly manufactured and unecological. Then again, he's also the kind of person who likes to spill tea on books and drop them in the bath, and you just can't do that with electronics. And since Amazon bought out Goodreads, he's been convinced they're not only going for a horizontal monopoly, which monopoly law doesn't know how to deal with, but they actually do have their sights set on dominating the words coming out of our mouths.
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