If you were to compile a list of the questions authors most hated to hear, “What is it about?” would likely rate very high, if not right at at the top. It’s a question that is both necessary to ask, but at the same time, it doesn’t really say much. If we could sum up our books in a satisfactory manner in a handful of sentences, it wouldn’t be much of a book worth talking about, would it?
Nonetheless, as much as I may loathe it… I have to try. Though I fear it won’t be a terribly brief summary.
The shortest, and most unhelpful answer is that Transcendent is about humanity slowly recovering from near annihilation after billionaires nearly destroy the world. And sure, if you wanted one sentence that kinda sorta set the stage for the first page of the book, that would be it.
But it’s also about how misinformation is twisted to lead people where they kinda wanted to go to begin with, and how the tribalistic nature of humans lends itself to (perhaps unnecessary) conflict. It also about the myth of meritocracy as it is currently told. It’s about finding your own path in a society that is hellbent on forcing you a very specific way. It’s about subtle and overt racism. It’s about misogyny. It’s about how people can be fed a plate of shit and have them asking for seconds.
It’s about my observations of the world around me. It’s about three main characters who don’t quite fit either trying to fit as best they can, or blow it all up, or desperately trying to keep us from blowing it all up more than it has to.
But Transcendent is also about questions, ones that I don’t necessarily have good answers for. How do we keep a society from taking bad bait? How do we manage bad faith agents? Hell, one big question is simply, “What makes us… well… us?”
If any of that sounds interesting to you, then you might like what’s inside this fairly hefty book, and those yet to come.
TKO Creations 