After a series of failed attempts to start new business ventures, the main character known as LP has returned to college to study his first love, music and recording. As the story progresses, LP discovers a ‘glitch’ with a digital recording of one of his favourite songs. He investigates further and discovers a number of other songs that also have these very minute changes compared to analog recordings. He takes them to his recording instructor (John Atman) and they explore the issue further. Atman introduces LP to an internationally renowned ‘omnibioacoustics’ expert (Eugene Case) to help them figure out what the glitch might be. They stumble on a mystery that has a massive scope and potential implication for all of humanity.
LP has two friends: Faith Amana, a social media maven; and Dion, a wine sales rep.
Meanwhile, a programmer named Sylvie Hunter has developed an AI platform called GAIA that is used to generate fake news, obfuscate real stories and manipulate the political and economic strata for the benefit of the Plutonian Council – a group of six extremely wealthy, evil and influential elites – that employ her.
Extinction Event joins a growing collection of books devoted to the category of Climate Fiction, or writing devoted to informing readers about our planet and how we’re abusing it. Extinction Event is part clarion call to all of us and how we treat Earth and all of its creatures; an informative yet amusing romp through global-scale events; and an exploration of the impact that artificial intelligence has and will have on all of us.
Emphasis in the original.
The story sounds not bad, and the cover isn’t lousy (by this site’s standards), I think. If only they knew what a blurb was supposed to be, as opposed to this plot summary and dramatis personae.
Thinking about your point, it occurs to me that there’s some similarity between what makes blurbs lousy and what makes some book covers lousy: the author honestly doesn’t get the fact that this is advertising copy, nothing more. I’m sure that the main character’s friends Faith and Dion are important to the novel, and the author really likes them. But just because they matter to the story doesn’t mean that they belong in the blurb. The blurb’s job is to interest your potential reader enough that he clicks on the sample, and then to STFU.
It’s a lot like the covers that have, for example, a jeweled hummingbird in a rainforest on the cover of their space opera. When Nathan posts it here with the False Flagging tag, the author charges in and huffs, “That hummingbird is critical to the plot!” And I’m sure it is, but the fact remains that it doesn’t do a good job of selling your story.
My brain is probably fried from too many years of LBC abuse, but I think this post looks better than most of the covers found here. The artwork is pretty cool, too–LP would probably like it.
But…am I hallucinating or do British-speaking authors seem to be over-represented at LBC?
Yeah, I didn’t have any problem with the cover itself, just the description.
“Over-represented” compared to what? French authors? Chinese? Esperanto?
Compared to the U.S. variety. I’ve been noticing this for several months.
(BTW, “this post” was referring to the post itself, words and all. For some reason, it sort of works.)
Eh. The Brits made English a thing; I’m willing to let them represent out of proportion to their demographics.
(What seems distinctively British about the material above? Or did you “cheat” and look into the author?)
probably “favourite” (the u gives away that it’s not a US author)
However, given that most of the reviews are from Canada, I’m guessing Canadian author, rather than British.
Australia and a few other countries also use British spelling while not being British.
Ah. Makes sense. (And I was raised in Canada, which explains why “favourite” didn’t stand out to me.)
The use of single quotation marks is another clue. But I first became aware of it on covers, where there are no blurbs. I’m not talking about spelling and punctuation conventions, I was just wondering if anyone else thought there seemed to be an unexpectedly high proportion of covers, etc., from British English authors. (I might have to change my bookmark to read ‘LBBC’.)