Santa Cruz News Features Nicole Sallak-Anderson's eHuman Dawn

eHuman Dawn: A Santa Cruz author’s first scifi novel hits e-bookshelves

December 5, 2013

Nicole Sallak Anderson has always loved writing, but at 18, when she was going to college, her father wasn’t exactly keen on the idea of pursuing it as a career.

Instead, she earned a degree from Purdue University and became a software engineer – a field she loved – and worked in encryption and network security software for years.
She never gave up her dream of writing though, and now she’s found a way for her two interests to intersect.

About three years ago, she woke up with an idea for a science fiction novel after a vivid dream. She wrote down some notes and when her two sons — now ages 12 and 14 — headed back to school that fall, she started writing what would become her first published novel. At first she wasn’t necessarily intent on getting it published, but the more she wrote, the more she became determined to get it out there for others to read. A writing conference in San Rafael helped her get a better handle on how to pitch an agent and she also got herself a writing coach and an editor. After pitching numerous editors, she finally got a bite.

Her book, eHuman Dawn, is now available for purchase as an e-book, and it’s just the first in what she says is a trilogy.

Deciding to go the e-book route first appealed to Nicole because she liked the immediacy and she liked the idea of not having to wait for a book to come out in print edition first. And given the topic of her novel, the medium seemed contextually appropriate.

So what’s eHuman Dawn about? Well, to put it simply, it’s about the future possibility in a post-singularity world, says Nicole.

Here’s the blurbage from the publisher:

The Great Shift is coming…. are you ready to jump?

Fast forward to the year 2242–a world in which death, disease, war and famine have been conquered, and where everything, including humans, are devices on Neuro, a complex network operating system that is controlled via human thought. Adam Winter has lived for nearly two hundred years in an eHuman body–a man of metal, fiber optics and plastic, on a world where no one dies and no one is born. Paradise on earth–until Adam discovers that the World Government is cutting power to entire cities, and his own city is on the list! 

Trapped in a body that must recharge on the network, Adam is swept up into the underworld of an eHuman anti World Government resistance, led by Dawn, the very first eHuman created. While the Resistance wages war against those in power, Dawn reveals to Adam a shocking secret about their past that not only bonds them together, but is also the Resistance’s ticket to gaining control over Neuro and taking down the World Government once and for all. Caught between the past and the future, Adam must rise up, claim his inheritance, and face his destiny– before eHumanity is powered down, forever. 

Essentially, the story is set in a world where we no longer have humans in the way we now think of that term. Instead we have non-carbon humanoid forms, aka “eHumans,” who lack flesh and must be recharged like an electronic appliance. Memories and thoughts are produced and controlled by software and other programs provided by one overarching network.

Protagonist Adam Winter is approached by a member of the resistance, a group of eHumans who come together and determine they don’t want their thoughts, desires and wants to be controlled by this network any longer.  Winter, a journalist, becomes intricately involved with the movement and with Dawn, the first eHuman ever created and the woman who initially approaches him.
The book explores the role of emotions and sex in a world where technology is the leading power, but it isn’t a romance novel per se. The romance is there, Nicole says, but it’s balanced with discussions of science and technology and its role in our lives.

Nicole says she had started thinking a lot about our connections to technology and our attachment to the electronic devices we’ve come to rely on. What would happen, she wondered, if we became the devices ourselves – providing us with a sense of immortality but also subjecting us to the limitations of technology? The intersections of technology and human consciousness are something she contemplates often.

“I’ve just always had a fascination with the technology and the mind – as well as the body and feelings, and the concepts of how the body works,” she says.
She also adds something that’s largely missing from the science fiction and technology world – a female voice.

eHuman Dawn is currently available on Amazon and it it might make a great gift for your science-fiction loving and eReader-owning friends and family, hint hint.

Be sure to check out her Facebook page, blog and Twitter feeds too, where she actively writes and interacts about many of the same topics she focuses on in her novel. And don’t worry – she’s already got most of the sequel written.

Reposted From Santa Cruz News