What would you do if you woke up to a world without electricity?
Last week, I started reading a new science fiction novel, Epoch, while eating lunch. It hooked me from page one and sent chills down my spine. On the first page, a young man wakes up, feeling sick and with no memory, and when he looks outside, he sees devastation. He soon realizes that something–some catastrophic event–has caused a massive power outage that affected airplanes and all electronic devices.
Late that night, my husband and I awoke when it started getting warm in our Arizona home. What happened to our air conditioner? we wondered. Upon investigating, we found that we had no electricity. All around our neighborhood, the lights were out. The only light came from the moon and stars and solar-powered landscape lights.
Not sure what was going on since we hadn’t had a big storm to our knowledge, I pulled out my cell phone and called the electric company. A recorded message told me that there was a power outage affecting counties all over the state. It said that the damage was so massive that they couldn’t give an estimate of when power would be restored.
Well, at least the cell phone towers were working. That was something positive.
After that, we went back to bed, but I couldn’t get back to sleep. How ironic that this happened after reading the first couple chapters of a book about a massive power outage.
Fortunately, eight hours later our power was restored and we found that the outage wasn’t as widespread as we’d thought.
I found it fascinating, though, to see how scary such an event as shown in Epoch would be. The book’s storyline, already lifelike, became more so. I finished the book and am happy to say it’s outstanding. It’s not only a good sci-fi/dystopian novel, but also a good murder mystery. And it’s more than that: it just might be a social statement.
Check out this excerpt from an interview I recently did with the author:
Epoch was released on July 25th, 2019. Can you tell us about the story?
What if you woke up one morning lying on the floor, head pounding, and realized you had no idea what you were doing there? Even worse, what if you discovered you had no idea who you were or what your name was, and there was no way to find out because everyone else has lost all their memories as well? To top it off, what if all electronics suddenly stopped functioning at the same time?
This is precisely the situation one young man finds himself in. He’s forced to try to rediscover his identity while struggling to find a path between what’s right and what’s necessary for survival. Sometimes the what’s right and what’s wrong aren’t so easily discernible.
Forced to cope with a wasteland of useless, dead technology in a world that had grown to rely so heavily on machines, the people of Jerome must learn to rebuild society without the modern conveniences they depended upon so strongly. They suffer power struggles, death and disease, and are even forced to face the birth of a serial killer, all while fighting to reinvent themselves. Epoch is an epic of love, death, friendship, and inner struggles. It’s a story uniting post-apocalyptic horror with philosophy and sociology.
You can read his book for free if you’re in Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program. You can also buy it in Kindle or paperback format on Amazon. While you’re at it, why not pick up a 99 cent copy of his first novel, A Fatal Exception?
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