When the mundane becomes mindbending… A visionary new SF novella from acclaimed author Nicholas Mennuti and legendary artist Howard Chaykin.
Night job? Check. No social life? Check. No friends or family? Check.
Who knew that cultivating an anti-social existence meant you risked stepping outside the space time continuum? That you could be kidnapped from your time without causing a damaging butterfly effect? Not Travis Schrader, that’s for sure.
Travis sleeps all day and works at a data center as a glorified night watchman. In short, Travis isn't exactly changing the world.
But aimlessly wandering through life has consequences he never dreamed of.
One night Travis is whisked from his mundane job to the year 2431, where quantum computers exist that solve problems by finding specific assets, across time if necessary, and they’ve quantified that at this precise moment in his time Travis is the most disconnected, useless person around, and thus the most available to be exploited. He is now the property of the world's most powerful corporation on the planet, and forced to do their bidding with no questions asked. He has been 'conscripted' as their literal property, sold like cast-off scrap, to be sent out on dangerous missions to protect the interests of an elite super-class warring for the few remaining unplundered spoils.
If Travis has any hope of surviving, he must realize that playing it safe in the future is no longer an option, if he wants to stay alive in the present.
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All artwork (c) copyright Howard Chaykin, 2021. All rights reserved.
Nicholas Mennuti is the writer of the espionage thriller Weaponized (Mulholland Books/Little Brown), which had film rights purchased by Universal Pictures and Scott Stuber. Nicholas's short stories have appeared in AGNI and Conjunctions, and he has written about the intersection of technology and entertainment for the Huffington Post. He is also a graduate of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts Dramatic Writing program
HOWARD VICTOR CHAYKIN is a longtime veteran of the comic book business. As a cartoonist—both writing and drawing—he has been a major influence on the direction of comics, referred to frequently as one of the primary architects of the modern comic book. His signature creation, AMERICAN FLAGG! introduced a new level of narrative complexity, depth of character, and point of view in its text, not to mention a previously unseen level of design and craft to the visual nature of an all too frequently staid and timid medium.
Chaykin’s THE DIVIDED STATES OF HYSTERIA enraged an entire new generation of the willfully ignorant who might have had a better case if they’d actually read the damned book.
The second arc of HEY KIDS! COMICS!, a fictionalized history of the comic book business, a love letter written with just a frisson of acid in the ink to the field he’s called home for five decades is available now.
