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Thursday 12 October 2017

Blog Tour Excerpt - The Stark Divide by J. Scott Coatsworth



The Stark Divide
Author:
J. Scott Coatsworth
Genre: Sci-Fi
Date Published: 10/10/17
Publisher: DSP Publications

Book Description:
Some stories are epic.

The Earth is in a state of collapse, with wars breaking out over resources and an environment pushed to the edge by human greed.

Three living generation ships have been built with a combination of genetic mastery, artificial intelligence, technology, and raw materials harvested from the asteroid belt. This is the story of one of them—43 Ariadne, or Forever, as her inhabitants call her—a living world that carries the remaining hopes of humanity, and the three generations of scientists, engineers, and explorers working to colonize her.

From her humble beginnings as a seedling saved from disaster to the start of her journey across the void of space toward a new home for the human race, The Stark Divide tells the tales of the world, the people who made her, and the few who will become something altogether beyond human.

Humankind has just taken its first step toward the stars.

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EXCERPT

For my guest post, I thought I’d share a scene from “The Stark Divide”:

Aaron ran through the memory core, pursued by red scouts sent by the station-mind. They were much faster and more agile than servitor-mind scouts, and he was having a hard time keeping ahead of them. He imagined himself breathing heavily, his virtual muscles tiring.

He shook his virtual head. That was the wrong way to go about it.

Instead, he was a cheetah.

Aaron veered down another passageway, bits of data casting an eerie blue glow across his path.

There was nothing for him here—nothing to do with his father’s death. He’d ascertained that much before the chase had begun. He had been so hopeful. Now he just needed a moment to make good on his escape.

He grabbed at a stack of data, scattering it behind him like so many glowing ones and zeroes. He hoped it wasn’t anything important.

Everything shifted around him, floors becoming walls, ceilings spiraling to become floors. The station-mind was trying to block his path. He was suddenly at the bottom of a deep pit, the walls alternating blue and orange around him.

He’d trained for this. He shifted his form, becoming a smooth silver sphere, and shot up through the vertical conduit.

Portals slammed shut behind him one by one, but they were too slow to catch him.

He visualized the outer reaches of the system as a bright light and shot toward it, evading every obstacle the station-mind sought to put before him, zipping left and right and sometimes in a direction that didn’t exist in the real world.

At last he escaped from the memory core.

He centered his mind and shot off like a ray of light down the path that had brought him into the station data stream. In a millisecond, he had left the scouts and the network behind, exiting through the flaw where he had entered, what seemed like hours before.

Aaron woke in his bed, soaked with sweat, in the small cabin he’d been assigned.

He glanced at his watch—just thirty minutes before his meeting with the director.

He stood and shucked off his clothing, throwing it in the cleaner.

Then he jumped into the shower, letting it wash away the cloying smell of stress sweat.





About the Author
Scott spends his time between the here and now and the what could be. Enticed into fantasy and sci fi by his mom at the tender age of nine, he devoured her Science Fiction Book Club library. But as he grew up, he wondered where all the people like him were in the books he was reading.

He decided that it was time to create the kinds of stories he couldn’t find at his local bookstore. If there weren’t gay characters in his favorite genres, he would remake them to his own ends.

His friends say Scott’s mind works a little differently – he sees relationships between things that others miss, and gets more done in a day than most folks manage in a week. He loves to transform traditional sci fi, fantasy, and contemporary worlds into something unexpected.

Starting in 2014, Scott has published more than 15 works, including two novels and a number of novellas and short stories.

He runs both Queer Sci Fi and QueeRomance Ink with his husband Mark, sites that bring queer people together to promote and celebrate fiction that reflects their own lives.

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Blog Tour Organised by:
Reading Addiction Blog Tours

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