LucidDream™
Mid-this-century, Käthe Lurie will be a celebrated civil engineering wunderkind, credited with saving both Long Island and Nantucket from the sea. She will also be a gaming addict, hooked on the world’s most popular unregulated platform, LucidDream™.
On a three-day cross-country trip to meet her new investors, Käthe’s ‘habit’ will expose her most-prized avatar, Julian Maas, to a freedom-fighting femme fatale named Bel, who has somehow managed to outlive her own creator. A torrid affair ensues, fueled by deception and by the limitless possibilities of the ‘Dream. Set against the crumbling backdrop of Käthe’s journey through the once-United States, the contrast could not be more clear, or the conclusion more tempting. As California nears, Käthe will be forced to choose: whether to keep salvaging the world she lives in, or roll the dice and pioneer the next.
Shades of Huxley, Pynchon, and Le Guin, LucidDream™ is a dark, comical, hallucinogenic meditation on the moment where we find ourselves right now–stepping through the looking glass into a hybrid realm of cyber- and bio-technologies that may well save us yet, or spell the end of life as we know it.
Brooks Hansen's five-dimensional LucidDream™ arrives just in time to illuminate how AI, immersive gaming, reality TV, and social media constitute both extensions of humans' ancient penchant for other lives, other worlds, and new lotus flowers that the legacy tech of the novel is uniquely poised to critique.
—Joe Sacksteder, author of Driftless and Hack House.
LucidDream™ is satire and commentary woven into a series of stories set in the foggy state where our lives and our sim-selves fight over who controls the persona. Hansen is investigating the crash between capital, technology, and the question of what of us will remain if we surrender our dreams to the realm of the artificial. As a Phil Dickian I am always looking for modern voices that combine humor, social satire, and weird specultive storytelling. Mission accomplished.
—David Arganoff author of A Night to Kill Nazis