New Featured Series – (R)evolution by Stephanie Saulter
You might have noticed that I don’t really stick to the “one featured series per month” thing. That’s because life sometimes has other plans for me and throws plans and ambition my way. As such I have decided to just read at my own leisure and post when I finish a book or have time to compose a post about the series. This has been an extremely busy year for me and I know the blog has suffered sometimes, but I still want to commit myself to posting, simply because I love doing it.
So for the next featured series, I’m going to do one that I hadn’t planned. I started reading Gemsigns a few days ago and the second book Binary is already waiting on my shelf. Even after a few pages of Gemsigns, I knew this was going to be a good book and a very interesting one too. I decided I wanted to dedicate the blog to the (R)evolution series and spread the word about this intelligent story. It’s just two books, so people who want to read with me and discuss the books afterwards are more than welcome. You can read what the books are all about below, have a look!
Book I: Gemsigns
Humanity stands on the brink. Again.
Surviving the Syndrome meant genetically modifying almost every person on the planet. But norms and gems are different. Gems may have the superpowers that once made them valuable commodities, but they also have more than their share of the disabled, the violent and the psychotic.
After a century of servitude, freedom has come at last for the gems, and not everyone’s happy about it. The gemtechs want to turn them back into property. The godgangs want them dead. The norm majority is scared and suspicious, and doesn’t know what it wants.
Eli Walker is the scientist charged with deciding whether gems are truly human, and as extremists on both sides raise the stakes, the conflict descends into violence. He’s running out of time, and with advanced prototypes on the loose, not everyone is who or what they seem. Torn between the intrigues of ruthless executive Zavcka Klist and brilliant, badly deformed gem leader Aryel Morningstar, Eli finds himself searching for a truth that might stop a war.
Book II: Binary
When confiscated genestock is stolen out of secure government quarantine, DI Sharon Varsi finds herself on the biggest case of her career… chasing down a clever thief, a mysterious hacker, and the threat of new, black market gemtech.
Zavcka Klist, ruthless industrial enforcer, has reinvented herself. Now the head of Bel’Natur, she wants gem celebrity Aryel Morningstar’s blessing for the company’s revival of infotech – the science that spawned the Syndrome, nearly destroyed mankind, and led to the creation of the gems. With illness in her own family that only a gemtech can cure, Aryel’s in no position to refuse.
As the infotech programme inches towards a breakthrough, Sharon’s investigations lead ever closer to the dark heart of Bel’Natur, the secrets of Aryel Morningstar’s past… and what Zavcka Klist is really after.
About the Author:
Stephanie Saulter is a speculative fiction writer and the author of Gemsigns and Binary, the first and second books in the ®Evolution series. Binary has just been published in the UK and Commonwealth; Gemsigns will be released in North America in May.
Stephanie is working on the third book of the ®Evolution, Gillung, in between doing press for the UK publication of Binary and the US launch of Gemsigns. She’s used to changing gears, having previously been a real estate developer, restaurant manager, corporate executive, public policy wonk, management consultant and creator of the Scriptopus online writing app. She doesn’t have a poor attention span; on the contrary she finds lots of things interesting, and figures you learn more by doing. Few of her jobs would appear to have any relationship to her Humanities degree (literature and anthropology) from MIT, but she would disagree. She lives in London.
