EBOOK
About
Four surreal stories with bizarre underpinnings and uncanny twists. "Roadblock" features a feckless architectural school graduate who falls in with a sixteen-year-old's dubious trucking venture to the rural south, only to confront mystical construction strikers. In "Randy and Laura," drug-addled Randy bemoans his fate as a slave employee in New Fascist Australia, working a gas station night-shift with Laura, who longs to escape both his insane delusions and a trauma Randy isn't equipped to understand. "Perpetual Starlit Night" explores an archeologist's arrival on a tiny artificial gravity platform in deep space to give a scholarly lecture to barbarian colonists who declare her a criminal like themselves. Finally, "Damage Patrol" describes how the Conscious Reach Corporation proposes to cure an entire city's mental illness, one tormented soul at a time. Michael D. Smith was raised in the Northeast and the Chicago area, then moved to Texas to attend Rice University, where he began developing as a writer and visual artist. His Jack Commer, Supreme Commander and Supreme Commander Laurie science fiction series are published by Sortmind Press. In addition, Sortmind Press has published Smith's literary novels Sortmind, The Soul Institute, CommWealth, Akard Drearstone, Jump Grenade, Asylum and Mirage, The University of Mars, and Zarreich. Smith's web site, sortmind.com, contains further examples of his novels and visual art, and he muses about writing and art processes at blog.sortmind.com.