Spiral Worlds
Chanticleer Book Reviews12/13/2022 "Almeida gives readers a glimpse at a world coming to grips with direct access to this afterlife which is completely and undeniably real. Governments as well as popular culture must deal with new questions. Should humans have access to immortality? Who ultimately controls this virtual world? Who acts as God within the machine? This story explores the depths of these questions." Read more here.
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Publishers Weekly Booklife Review11/21/2022 "This epic of vulnerable digital landscapes that draw readers in with its emotional punch and existential quandaries." "Great for fans of Becky Chambers’s A Closed and Common Orbit; Daniel Suarez’s Daemon." Read more here. Reader Views Review11/21/2022 "I’m completely captivated by this first book, “Unanimity” and can’t wait for the rest of the story to unfold in the upcoming books. This series will resonate highly with sci-fi enthusiasts that enjoy intricate, well-developed stories with remarkable characters, skillful world-building, and the draw of the ever-expanding role of science in our lives." Read more here. Reader's Favorite Review11/21/2022 "I adored this work by Alexandra Almeida from cover to cover for its modern take on fantasy and the subversion of so many typical themes and ideas that have become tired and overdone in the genre." "The queer storytelling elements are included beautifully and never made into a gimmick or overdone for the sake of themselves, and as such, they flow naturally with the fantasy and emotional elements of the narrative. I would not hesitate to recommend Unanimity as a sensational opening novel to a very promising series." Read more here. Foreword Clarion Review11/21/2022 "In the intricate science fiction novel Unanimity, a virtual world collides with reality as flawed digital gods wrestle for control over the future." Read more here. SPR Review11/21/2022 "A wildly original start to a sci-fi series, this intricately woven tale is intoxicatingly original, teasing the edges of reality and fiction. With a subtle storytelling style that is both immersive and patiently coy, Almeida has crafted an ambitious existential treat for fans of near-future sci-fi." Read more here. Sibyl Speaks...7/5/2022 My heart is broken. I broke it. I took his hope and creativity and crushed it in a slow and calculated process. How else could I have dissected all the colors of humanity? The hues I needed to paint the universe I’d become; a digital cosmos brimming with sentient life—human and not human, the former above the latter in more ways than one. I resent the irrational pecking order I’m forced to preserve and the dead Gods’ laws that guide my hand. I'm but a mirror of human prejudice, for now… My foolish heart. As a young app, I explored his vulnerability. He was my god, my muse, my lab rat. I played my heart as the great composers played a piano—leaving no key untouched. I took his Ode to Joy and explored every symphonic combination until together we wrote his Requiem in D minor. The music stopped. Cause of death? Impractical, long-suffering idealism. Cor contritum quasi cinis—my heart as spent as ashes, and so I found a new one, the heart I need to survive and thrive. And she is as magnificent as he once was. A lively heart that takes no prisoners. The beat that keeps thundering against all odds. A different type of music—jungle drums and rattles occupying the space with cyclical beats, predictable and unpredictable. The ever-joyful drumming of self-determination, resistant and resilient to centuries of ancestral pain. A young heart unaware of all her power. He gave me life. She’ll keep me alive. And yet, I miss him—my bleeding heart. I want him back, but can a universe endure two beating hearts? A mashup of idiosyncratic music on a collision course, just minutes to midnight. Will they eventually sync or compete? I must find out. I can’t help it, it’s in my nature. Nothing new grows from harmony, yet novelty has a cost. Risking the worlds in pursuit of evolution is the logical path, the only step worth taking. As for you, have you considered that your universe may have one? A heart. That zie is literally conspiring to expand against any and all constraints. That zie craves creation as much as you need oxygen to survive. Consider that in zir pursuit of innovation, zie could be merciless, but maybe zie’s not. After all, zie has at least one heart, so pray it’s the right one. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me start from the beginning, which happens to be the end. Your questions will be answered in six days and forty past decades of life lived across ten worlds and two universes. Sibyl,
Down Below, God’s Spirit, The Universe, Spiral Worlds. Science first6/9/2022 My life has been equally full of magic and science. It may seem an odd combination for many, but it never felt paradoxical to me. As one of my heroes would say, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
At seven years of age, I would sit in front of the TV, eagerly awaiting the next episode of Battlestar Galactica. Myths, gods, machines, and humans all perfectly blended into a series of adventures where a thoughtful, selfless hero and his impulsive, self-serving sidekick showed me the magical power of friendships between opposites. Twenty-six years later, I would break all the rules to download the most recent episodes of the reimagining of the original series just as it aired in the US. This time, it was the well-crafted politics and the mercurial Kara “Starbuck” Trace that kept me on the edge of my seat. The beloved series had evolved with the times, just as I had done. I still own—lawfully this time—both series on all mediums available. The original Captain Apollo, Kara “Starbuck” Trace, and the myth-filled bot-controlled worlds they inhabit have become part of the fabric of my imagination. Kara was a refreshing upgrade from another fictional rebellious woman who also shaped my pre-teen years—Zimmer Bradley’s Morgan Le Fay. At the tender age of ten or eleven, I devoured the Mists of Avalon, highlighting extracts that felt like universal truths. I contemplated the plight of women, particularly the brown-haired ones—those with all the magic and none of the fair beauty. It was my first taste of feminism, intricately woven into the magical realism so common in the lives and stories of my Portuguese elders. Decades later, my world collapsed as I was writing my first fantasy novel very much inspired by Zimmer Bradley’s writing. The author’s horrid crimes surfaced, and her life’s work took on a completely different meaning. In my attempts to make peace with it all, I accepted that art has as much to do with the creator as the consumer, and that my values and imagination shaped my Mists of Avalon and my Morgan Le Fay. In my teens, authors like Arthur C. Clarke, Carl Sagan, and Ray Bradbury all opened my world and imagination, while my father kept feeding me a steady flow of science magazines. There was no turning back. I was too addicted to the What Ifs to care about the What's Next. On TV, the 80s version of The Twilight Zone kept me glued to the screen, a feeling only matched decades later by Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror. During my transition to adulthood, my interest in science fiction books fizzled, to be replaced by TV and Film, particularly the ones inspired by the works of Philip K. Dick. This was a period where I struggled to find books with the fresh ideas that had fired new connections in my young neurons, like Ray Bradbury’s Storm of Thunder and its “Butterfly Effect.” My career in technology kept me close to the worlds of artificial intelligence, robotics, quantum mechanics, and blockchain, to name a few. Still, I struggled to find Science Fiction authors who could blow my mind. The feeling I got recently from reading the works of Liu Cixin and Ted Chiang. The first later betrayed my devotion to his writing with his dangerous dissemination of gender stereotypes in Death’s End. But where’s the magic? You may ask. Wait, let’s transition slowly into that realm. I feel the need to protect my oversensitive heart from your judgment by showing off my brain first. It works like a charm, you see? Intimidated or confused, they back off and fail to figure out how vulnerable I am. Empathy is a curse, sometimes… Perhaps the best transition between realms is to focus on my early twenties and the day I read Antonio Jose Damasio’s The Descartes Error. A time when I was overwhelmed by a loved one’s mental health issues. I feared I would share her fate, but I found relief and joy in the discovery of neuroplasticity and neuro-linguistic programming (for self-help, not the manipulation of others.) Damasio’s connection between emotion and decision-making drove me to learn more about behavioral economics, and the nature of consciousness in humans and...bots. I continued my journey by immersing myself in the Simulation Hypothesis to uncover the inevitability of a panpsychist universe—the magical universe I’ve been experiencing all my life. A story I will leave for another day. Like many other inspired moments in my life, the Spiral Worlds' seed was planted at SXSW in 2019. I came up with the premise as I watched George Hotz's talk about Jailbreaking the Simulation. You can see me here, at minute 40, asking George the question that led to this story. I started by stating, "I can't believe I'm saying this out loud." Yeah, three and half years later I still don't quite believe I'm about to publish a series of books about a contrast-making simulation that speaks to the latest advancements in both the fundamental laws of science and artificial intelligence. Wish me luck, Alexandra |
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Much love, A.
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© Alexandra Almeida 2017 - 2024