Eileen Schuh at home

I love skipping out of the ordinary, into realms of ‘what-if’ and ‘if only’, both as a reader and a writer. As odd as it may seem, there are lessons to be learned from realities that are no more than mere imaginings and sometimes those lessons are easier learned from a well-told story than from the pulpit. The best stories, to me, are those that are thought-provoking as well as entertaining.

If it’s at all  possible to learn from mistakes before they occur, SciFi is one of the best tools. Although, judging from our current privacy issues, we perhaps didn’t learn all that we ought to have from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, here’s hoping at least some of the messages in my latest release, DISPASSIONATE LIES, get through.

Ladesque is an ordinary woman in a life that is so bland at the start of that novella, boredom is driving her stir crazy. Although the year is 2035, little about her world is different than ours, because a global economic crisis and the collapse of the internet ground technical progress to a stop decades earlier. Her generation of females is different, though,  having been born sterile and without libido. Although to some, that situation is ghastly, to her it is also quite ordinary.

This near-future setting is the back drop against which Ladesque must learn and grow and hopefully take the reader along with her.

If cyber-snooping abilities such as Snowden’s, and privacy invasions such as Wikileaks’, or cyberattacks such as the recent eBay fiasco keep escalating...what will we do? If banks and governments and militaries get hacked, will it cause a massive global financial collapse...or has that already happened?

What will our world be like if fertility rates keep decreasing? If hormones in our environment keep increasing? If loss of libido continues to be an acceptable, common pharmaceutical side-effect?  If...

Do we care? Should we care? Should we act now to prevent drastic results or simply prepare for the day when a generation of sexless females exist in a world struggling to recover from The Great Crash of 2015?

Such weighty contemplations will not likely intrude into your enjoyment of the novella, however.  Such musings will come after the story ends. After Ladesque solves the code, uncovers her secret past, experiences sexuality, takes part in a top-secret FBI project...falls in love.

After all that, you will wonder if we ought to be worrying less about who has nuclear capabilities and worry more about other threats--like who possesses the technology to develop the quantum computer. Because in the near future, that is where unfathomable power will lie.