Description

When I began writing this novel, I had only a rough idea of how I would bring some current technological ideas into it, but I felt that they would develop as the story unfolded. I used one idea I had thought of many years ago, but it still seemed a good way to introduce the family patriarch, Ed Grendil, a successful scientist/inventor who had made his fortune from developing a spy chip along with his quirky associate Robert Sikes. Their association fell apart, but Sikes went on to develop a lethal nanotechnological weapon, involving injected “nanobots" to wreak fatal neurological damage on selected victims. Although the novel is mainly set a few years hence, I don’t consider it properly science fiction, but rather an adventure novel that makes use of fictional science.

I open the story in a very slow moving, almost dreamlike, way, beginning with one character. Another is added, then a complex network of interactions begins. Action elements are introduced in a kind of pyramidal way, reaching a peak well before the end of the story. Symmetrically, the action then dwindles toward a slow motion similar to that at the beginning, providing partial closure with a diminishing number of characters. The text contains some violence and sexual activity, all of which I like to think is pertinent to the story line to focus the interplay of the characters.

The basic group of protagonists is the Grendil family, whose adventures form the thread of the plot. The wealth Ed Grendil had accumulated through development of a spy chip allowed the rest of the family to drift along without financial worry. The Fourier transform chip he and Robert Sikes developed was installed in U.S. made computers sold all over the world. It enabled information passing through the bus to be transformed and transmitted wirelessly, for remote pickup and reassembly. Because Ed and Robert were poles apart politically, they went separate ways and developed an increasing hatred of one another.

When the story opens, Ed's indolent son Carl is described as having a consuming fascination for the shadows that fall through the trees onto pathways in summer. He spends his time photographing them but because housing developments are encroaching, he has more recently moved his interest to a cluster of decaying industrial buildings in the same town. He spends most of every day here, and eventually meets a young woman who entices him to join a secretive quasi-military organization called Soldiers of Sacrifice. The meeting and his enlistment are part of a plan by Ed to counter his indolence, and it works -- Carl becomes an enthusiastic recruit and plunges into the training program, which teaches the Soldiers how to kill leading enemies of the country one by one. The principal weapon for the SOS is an injection of neurobots that subsequently making their way toward the brain and causing a rapid and excruciatingly painful death.

Turning ever more socialistic, Ed organizes a political party to overthrow the stranglehold the insurance companies have on health benefits and disaster relief. The wild success of the party causes his former colleague Robert Sikes to plan for his destruction. Sikes is possessed by passion for Ed's beautiful wife Lyn, and in addition to slaking his lust with her, he senses that she may be a weapon against Ed. He plans an attack that involves Lyn as well as the other children, the twins Max and Anna, who seem to drift through life much the way Carl does.

In further and increasingly dramatic episodes, all of the characters find themselves interacting in ways that are sometimes fatal, but always intense, with an overriding veneer of eroticism stemming from the lustful Sikes. The novel’s ending is as slow moving as the beginning, providing a thoughtful period for the reader, and presumably the fictional characters, to contemplate how things may have been done differently.