Biohack Archives - Author JD Lasica

For decades, fiction authors have built worlds for their books that, over time, become reality. H.G. Wells imagined inspired inventions from the laser to email. Jules Verne envisioned modern submarines, TV newscasts and lunar modules. Isaac Asimov predicted robotics and mobile computing. “Star Trek” conjured the holodeck and universal translators. I still get chills thinking of Ray Bradbury’s short story “The Veldt.”

A novellette by Isaac Asimov appeared in the September 1950 edition of Weird Tales.

As the tech advances, engineers and technologists begin to build what seemed like science fiction fantasy only a few years or decades before. Today, teams at Amazon AWS and elsewhere are working on a sort of universal translator. And what is a holodeck but an advanced form of virtual reality?

Not all such fantasies pan out — we still don’t have Wells’ time machine or invisible man — but a funny thing is happening as the future rushes toward us ever faster: The mind-bending changes that new technologies imprint on society are no longer centuries or decades away. They’re right around the corner.

That means near-future fiction is no longer the province of just sci-fi authors. Nora Roberts, writing as J.D. Robb, has a lengthy Eve Dallas series of police procedurals set in the 2050s. Daniel Suarez has given us “Change Agent” and “Daemon.” Andy Weir’s “The Martian” is more science thriller than sci-fi. Matthew Mather gives us “CyberStorm” and “Polar Vortex” without tipping into straight-out sci-fi — it’s the realism that makes it all so scary. Even Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One” hews to a credible futuristic landscape circa 2045.

Over at Forbes.com, technology columnist Giovanni Rodriguez has a smart new piece titled, How A Great Techno-Thriller Might Help Us Reshape The Future. In it, he holds up my new high-tech thriller, Catch and Kill, as an example of this new breed of suspense novel that warns of the dark side of emerging technology. [Read more…] about How cutting-edge fiction shapes our future

At last week’s book release party for my new thriller “Biohack,” about 30 people — including several notable figures from the tech, marketing and media worlds — turned out for an event that doubled as a book party and a media salon discussion about self-publishing.

Over the next several weeks, I’ll be writing a series of articles about my return to book publishing. It’s a completely different world today than in 2005, when I published “Darknet” and needed an agent (Deirdre Mullane), a publishing house (John Wiley & Sons) and had to wait a full year to see it published.

INDIE AUTHORS

One author’s self-publishing journey

As I said at the outset of the Facebook Live circle-in-the-round conversation, it reminded me of my last book release party in May 2005 — at the now-defunct Varnish Art Gallery in SoMa — but it also showed how dramatically the book publishing landscape has changed since “Darknet” came out.

Back then, after submitting my manuscript to the editors at John Wiley & Sons, I had no say about the title of the book, the book’s cover design, how it would be marketed or just about anything else. The business and marketing processes were opaque, the book contract assigned all intellectual rights to the publisher for something like 30 years and an author would make perhaps 7 percent of the book’s sales in royalties, with the lion’s share going to the publishing house and 15 percent of my cut to my agent.

Well, how times have changed. [Read more…] about ‘Biohack’ book release: Talking about indie publishing

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