Code Beast (Wanton Sun, 2023). Cover by Matthew Revert.
I see that my last post here on Sleepy Brain was from June 2021: ‘Greetings from Lockdown 4.0’.
Since then, nothing.
I look back on past posts and they are feverish, an outpouring never to be repeated, circumstantial evidence of a bizarre and unprecedented time.
Once the crisis was over, it became harder to write in this space, here inside this Sleepy Brain. It was daunting. The spectre of my pandemic self was too confronting to return to.
Twitter was like a notebook for me, recording ideas and sparks of inspiration, feeding into stories and posts, but I use it less and less. I look at my tweets since June 2021, and it’s not much, just ghostly echoes of a time when I had something to say.
Yet it’s not accurate to say I’ve been idle. On the contrary, my new novel, Code Beast, was published this week by Wanton Sun.
You can purchase it here.
Code Beast imagines a near future in which augmented reality is mainlined directly into the brain, but the technology is new and so schisms occur, cracks between worlds.
Inside the cracks there are ghosts, intimations of alien intelligence.
Here’s what the publisher says:
The first stage is infection. Next is possession. The terminal stage is simulation.
The wait is over.
CODE BEAST by Simon Sellars is here, the perfect novel for these AI-paranoid times. Set in a near-future of lovelorn AI, psychopathic autonomous cars and sadistic bots, it’s a bleak vision from the cult author of Applied Ballardianism.
In the near future, Kalsari Jones is hooked on the Vexworld, a global mixed-reality network accessed through neural implants. As his addiction grows, he is plagued by sentient hallucinations and an urge to strip the flesh from his bones. At his lowest ebb, he must also face his latent digisexuality, an erotic attraction to artificial intelligence.
Seeking answers, he meets Ingram Ravenscroft, a cult leader who claims a treatment for digisexuality. Smitten, Kalsari allows his brain to be rewired, only for the operation to leave him with unwanted telepathic powers. Lost in inner space, Kalsari angers a band of rogue AI who’ve escaped the Vexworld and are seeking refuge in the time-sinks of the fourth dimension.
Battling the shapeshifting bots before they can enslave his mind, he discovers the shocking truth about his virtual obsessions—and Ravenscroft’s hidden role in the story of his life.
Code Beast is a quasi-sequel to Applied Ballardianism, and if you squint a bit, you can read the first line as a direct follow-on from the last line of Applied Ballardianism, which ended a chapter that shunted AB from theory-fiction into pure science fiction.
There are other links to AB peppered throughout CB, some explicit, some subtle, but mostly Code Beast stands alone.
So, there have been no entries here, but a novel instead. Good or bad? I’ll leave that for you to decide.
Here is the link to buy the thing.
And here is a post on Medium that I wrote, explaining how Code Beast came to be, including the connections between AB and CB. Actually, this newsletter tested many of the nascent ideas that fed into the book, so if you enjoyed my posts back then, you may well like Code Beast (in fact, if you look back at that June 2021 entry, I talk a bit about the work in progress).
Finally, a favour to ask.
If you read Code Beast and you like it, please consider leaving a review or rating somewhere online (Amazon, Goodreads etc). Wanton Sun is a small (tiny) press and it’s very hard to gain traction these days. Also, ChatGPT is going to slaughter all writers and publishers anyway, so this may be my last shot.
Anyway, it’s been so nice to talk to you all again.
I’ve really missed you x