You are cordially invited to an online party for John Sundman's novel Acts of the Apostles and nine other competitors: the current Blog Tour de Force (#blogtourdeforce) sponsored by the Indie Book Collective. To support John and Acts (doesn't that sounds New Testamenty? just in time for Easter week!) in their "cage match", visit John's blog on wetmachine on Wednesday April 20th and leave a comment. The book whose author's blog gets the most comments wins the daily contest.

There are prizes for us readers as well, but I am posting because I have a major crush on John's second book, Cheap Complex Devices (if you're willing to leave Open, here's the long version) and so John's better-known thriller Acts of the Apostles is for me the hot, toned older brother (whom I have only just met) of the androgynous and evanescent apparition who has tormented my dreams for so long. I'm hoping that he'll put in a good word for me with his sister, or brother, or whatever CCD is (probably non human, if you want the truth).

A few bytes of non-spoilery info about Acts of the Apostles:

1. In science fiction, the plot is the thing: extrapolating from what is known, making intelligent guesses about science of the near future, and stirring the whole into an intoxicating cocktail is the indispensible skill. If you value that skill, you will like the fact that the science is at the center of Acts, and to quote one of its characters in another context, "Even the boring parts were interesting."

2. The knock on some of the classic "novels of ideas" is that they tend to have wooden characters; should I discuss Asimov or Rand here During my first reading I was unable to tell the heroes from the villains, but I also appreciated the nuanced characters who caused the difficulty. John shows how science is done, but also why people do science.

The foreground characters interact in, to quote John Jurek's review, "a bold ethical statement about the inexorable but blind quest of science, the technonological hubris that feeds off of it, and freedom of the individual mind that is threatened by it." Or if you prefer a roman à clef covering the tech/biotech landscape of the seventies through the nineties, John has some background characters for you.

3. Extra credit: imagine what Acts read like on first publication in 1999, many chip releases ago! John believes, "In many ways it's more timely today than when I wrote it." But it's early prescience that gives prophecy its sizzle.

4. Acts is considered a comparatively successful self-published and self-marketed book (recognized for this by Writer's Digest et al), and yet it has recently been purchased and professionally edited (just tightened, not changed in fundamentals), and will eventually be re-published, by Underland Press. A story of transformation: will it be transformed? 

Some of us Protestants spend Wednesday of Holy Week celebrating a service called Tenebrae (Latin for "darkness" or "shadows"). Sounds like a perfect day to celebrate a novel with a dark angel at its heart!

[More details at the Blog Tour de Force web site.]

Note: John's first three novels work together (even though each seems to be in a different sub-genre within science fiction) as an uber-projecct called Mind Over Matter. Michael Allen has reviewed them all. (I'm not reading Michael's reviews until I finish my own.) They have numbers rather than colors so there is no "right" order in which to read them. The two I have encountered so far have the same epigraphs, which "read" very differently in the different contexts. To be continued.