Description

[from the back cover]

“Awakening” continues the saga started by The Chronicles of the Upheavals. It’s been roughly 30 years since the Upheavals began. The street-wise youths of Book One are now the wise and experienced leaders of the Awakening Movement.

Through their eyes, we see how the Upheavals affected other peoples and continents, focusing on Europe, Africa, and Asia, including:

• Facing class warfare in California… with drones and surface to air missiles.
• Negotiating with a trigger-happy jungle tyrant in Thailand.
• Witnessing the birth of the “hemi-humans” – half human and half… something else.
• Learning from the “War Lady”, a former violent warlord turned radical South African ecologist.
• Trying to tame a quantum computer gone completely out of her mind – if she ever had one.
• Finding new homes for half a billion refugees of global climate change.
• Dealing with the enigmatic hive mind known as “Unity” that overshadows all Culture Council decisions.
• And… the return of the person instrumental to the creation of the Awakening Movement, who comes back to plot its undoing.

The Upheavals were particularly devastating for the United States – so many people there were “future-starved” – unable to envision a world beyond their status quo. Even when faced with clear alternatives, people still embraced denial, scapegoating, and status-quoism.

And, despite the global successes of the Awakening Movement, there are still plenty of gun-toting paramilitaries, brain-dead politicians, religious zealots, druggies, warlords, nut cases, fundamentalists, survivalists, refugees…

The Chronicles of the Awakening is a work of speculative fiction.