It's 2058. Six years ago, the Winter of Disconnect shattered Britain and stole Jas McDonnell's childhood. She survived. Millions didn't.
Now Jas manages survivor's guilt with electromagnetic emotional correction, artificially induced reality, and good old chemical escape. She scrapes a living under the unblinking lenses of the storybirds, hoping to trigger their interest algorithms and stream a few moments of her life to poverty-voyeurs in the transhumanist playground of Grand London.
But when a truckload of illegal bio-fabricators arrives in her backwater town, life turns upside-down for Jas. The posthuman demigods in the capital are definitely watching now. And her real-time soap opera is about to become a horror movie.
Safe State is grimy post-cyberpunk for readers who love the deep immersion of William Gibson's The Peripheral**, the bleakly real tech extrapolations of Daniel Suarez's** Change Agent**, and the dark British cynicism of Charles Stross's classic** Accelerando**. In an age where we fear what our machines and AI will become, Safe State asks: shouldn't we be more afraid of what we'll become ourselves?**
Praise for Jay Klements:
"I haven't been this blown away by an author's achievement since House of Leaves. I'm on my second read, revelling in the prose, characters, and world. Buy this book. It's one of the best you'll read." ????? (Amazon Review of Safe State)
"It's a rare occasion when you pick up a new author and know within the first few pages that you'll want to read everything they publish. Segmentation Fault was that kind of story for me." ????? (Amazon Review of Segmentation Fault)
"Safe State's world is an absolutely standout creation, full of fascinating ideas—the Storybirds, the Hoffman-Schwarz syndrome, those emotion inductors—and such clever extrapolations of current tech that, reading it, this future seems not only possible but somehow likely." ????? (Amazon Review of Safe State)
"This is gripping, fresh cyberpunk with relatable, clearly defined characters, each with their own arc, and an ending that will make your head spin." ????? (Amazon Review of Safe State)
"I adored this story. I'm a sucker for a near-future dystopia and Segmentation Fault's world is one for the ages — fascinating, terrifying, and all so grimly plausible." ????? (Amazon Review of Segmentation Fault)
"This book nails the quintessential "high tech, low life" grit of cyberpunk, but blends in a deeply relatable, sympathetic character I really came to care for." ????? (Amazon Review of Safe State)
