Cody Sisco has a new queer sci-fi mystery thriller out, Resonant Earth book one: Broken Mirror. And there’s a giveaway!

A fractured mind or a global conspiracy? Uncovering the truth can be hell when nobody believes you… and you can’t even trust yourself.

Broken Mirror is the first volume in a queer psychological science fiction saga that looks at the stigma of mental illness and the hellish distrust and alienation that goes with it.

Victor Eastmore knows someone killed his grandfather, the pioneering scientist Jefferson Eastmore. But Victor, diagnosed with mirror resonance syndrome, has been shunned by Semiautonomous California society. Nobody will believe a Broken Mirror. Now Victor must tread the line between sanity and reclassification—a fate that all but guarantees he’ll lose his freedom.

With its self-driving cars, global firearms ban, and a cure for cancer, the science fiction world of Broken Mirror may sound like a near future utopia, but on Resonant Earth, history has taken a few wrong turns. The American Union is a weak and fractious alliance of nations in decline. Europe manipulates its citizens through propaganda. And Asia is reeling from decades of war.

Determined to uncover the truth about Jefferson’s murder, pansexual Victor and his trans friend Elena set out on a road trip that takes them across the American Union from Semiautonomous California through the Organized Western States to the Republic of Texas. But Elena is holding something back, and Victor’s condition worsens.

Amid shifting geopolitical sands, Broken Mirrors like Victor find themselves at a cyberpunk crossroads: evolve or go extinct.

Warnings: violence, discrimination against characters with mental health challenges

Universal Buy Link | Goodreads

Giveaway

Cody is giving away an ebook copy of Tortured Echoes, the sequel to Broken Mirror:

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Direct Link: http://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/display/b60e8d47317/?

Excerpt

A new universe, its vibrations, called to me, and I answered, ignorant of the harm in crossing over.
—Victor Eastmore, Apology to Resonant Earth, (transmission date unknown)

Semiautonomous California
29 February 1991

It’s one thing to die quietly with things left unsaid among family members. It’s another thing to do what the great Jefferson Eastmore did with his secrecy and architecture of conspiracy: keep essential truths from Victor and put him on a collision course with an uncanny future.

Victor gazed across City Lake toward the tessellated foothills, where the elite families of Oakland and Bayshore kept their hedges trimmed and thorny. His grandfather’s sarcophagus was up there, surrounded by marble pillars and gold-gilt fencing shaped like twisted strands of DNA. A tidy and neat brick gravemound would never have sufficed, since at the end of his life, Jefferson was as grandiose as his cancer-curing career. The stones were plucked from the canals of New Venice, and a plaque listed the man’s many accomplishments. Not listed was his failed effort to cure Victor of mirror resonance syndrome.

Victor spun around to face the city skyline. The morning was bright and windy. The timefeed on his MeshBit indicated thirty minutes until his reclassification appointment. He could go and wait in the anteroom, but his anxious vibrations might shake the building to its foundations.

He took a breath. No going back. Before the sun reached its zenith that day, his path would materialize. If he were lucky, he could stay a Class Three: free but under close supervision. Or he could become a Class Two: under guard, imprisoned, at a rancho in the hinterlands. He whispered a cherished but inconsistently effective mantra to fight off brain blankness: The wise owl listens before asking who. Each episode of blanking out was one more step toward mirror resonance syndrome’s inevitable tragic end: becoming a comatose Class One, insensate, a forgotten ward of the government. The only unknown factor was how quickly the future would crash against him.

He trudged along the shoreline, tensing and relaxing his jaw, trying to distract himself. Glittering towers rose exultantly cityside. Squally breezes swooped out of a cloudless, azure sky and assaulted bulrushes, sedges, and cattails in the shallows where a grid of waterplots penned them in.

Granfa Jefferson had been poisoned. Victor knew it. He had proof. But his family didn’t believe him, and if he said any more about it, he would be locked away. Fair? No. Surprising? Not really. After all, his life was a farcical succession of tragedies. It wasn’t time to give up, though. Not while he had unanswered questions.

The palm trees encircling the lake rustled like cheerleaders shaking their pom-poms. The water rippled, creating countless sun flashes on the lake’s surface, and afterimages glowed and pulsed when he closed his eyes. The stench of goose shit turned his stomach.

He wedged the MeshBit’s detachable sonobulb in his ear, then called Elena. She answered right away. This was not the first time her promptness was suspicious.

“See?” she said. “When a friend calls, you should answer. Right away. Not never.”

“I know. I need your help,” he said. “My appointment is here. I’m having trouble.”

“Where are you?” she asked.

“City Lake. West shore.”

“I can’t get there in time.”

You were there for Granfa Jeff’s funeral. You showed up at my apartment whenever you wanted. Why can’t you be here now?

“Then talk to me,” Victor said. “Anything to keep my mind off my theories about Granfa Jeff.”

At the time, Victor had nothing close to the truth about Jefferson’s secret messages and plans for conspiracy and counter-conspiracy. He couldn’t have guessed his role in the proliferating conflagration that would transform every person on Resonant Earth and beyond. No one could have predicted the neuro-contagion that eventually radiated beyond the American Union of Nations, or the mind-machine hybridization that became humanity’s destiny, or the fact that crossing over to another world would become a possibility rather than paranoia. If Victor had guessed any of it, he might have failed his reclassification deliberately and shown up at the gates of a rancho to check himself in. All this was a lot to have piled onto a mentally unstable young adult.

“But you found radiation on the data egg,” Elena said. “I believe you. We’re going to figure this out.”

Author Bio

Cody Sisco is an author, editor, publisher, and literary community organizer. His LGBT psychological science fiction series includes two novels thus far, Broken Mirror and Tortured Echoes. He is a freelance editor specializing in genre-bending fiction and the acquisitions editor for RIZE Press. In 2017, he co-founded Made in L.A. Writers, an indie author co-op dedicated to the support and appreciation of independent authors. His startup, BookSwell, is a literary events and media production company dedicated to lifting up marginalized voices and connecting readers and writers in Southern California and beyond. He serves as a co-executive on the Board of Governors for the Editorial Freelancers Association, as the treasurer for the LGBTQ+ Editors Association, and as a board member at APLA Health.

Author Website: https://www.codysisco.com

Author Facebook (Personal): https://www.facebook.com/codysisco

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Author Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/14848998.Cody_Sisco

Author Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Cody-Sisco/author/B01AOMHSTE

Is Utopia a Dirty Word? 

Broken Mirror

In the world of Broken Mirror, cancer has been cured, civil rights for all citizens of the American Union of Nations are respected, and guns are strictly regulated everywhere. At first glance, I can see why you might think it’s a utopia. Indeed, librarians catalogued the book that way.

Cataloging is an interesting process. Publishers submit their data to wholesalers and retailers using standard categories. But librarians also have a say on how a book is categorized. It’s their expertise and their domain. So it was at first a surprise and then a delight, after the first edition of Broken Mirror was published in 2016 and I was looking up where the book was available at libraries across the country, when I discovered that it had been categorized under Utopias and Utopian Fiction, among other designations. 

Fast forward to when I attended the American Library Association conference this year in San Diego. The convention center—the same one that hosts Comic Con—was filled with people who work with books in all kinds of ways. There were authors, publishers, artists, publicists, technologists, and of course librarians. The librarians who attended were looking for books to acquire but also for ideas and systems to help them run programs for their patrons, which vary from book collections and author talks to crafts, literacy courses, VR and technology hubs, and much more. In a way, libraries are the custodians of a utopian version of the future that is accessible, small-d democratic, and built on concepts of intellectual freedom, self-improvement, and community care. 

However, I can understand how readers might have some qualms about calling my book a utopia. First, it’s too dark. Kirkus Reviews wrote that “the world and the characters work together to effectively form a cohesive story about how easy it is for society to classify a group of people as dangerous outsiders.” Juliana Caro reviewed the book for Reedsy and called it “a breathtaking, deeply dark alternate-history Earth with complex characters, layered worldbuilding, and twist after twist after twist.” Bleak, right?

The other problem with calling Broken Mirror a utopian book is that, when I try out the phrase, I get too many blank stares in response. Everyone is very clued in to what a dystopia is: the end of the world, things changing in unsettling ways, dark powers controlling things in secret. There are some elements of this in my book, but they’re balanced by those nice things like everyone enjoying civil rights. 

The story is also definitely not about a false utopia, where things appear great on the surface, but danger lurks beneath the surface. The dangers in my book are part of the premise and they are front and center on purpose. We are familiar with false utopias through tropes introduced to the popular imagination by Twilight Zone, Star Trek, and many others, such as The Truman Show, Black Mirror, WandaVision, etc. But I’ve always been writing what I see as a realistic and balanced story about how our present could be if we made different choices throughout our history.

It’s important to note that a utopia is not a place where everything is perfect. It’s a thought experiment that imagines different structures and forces, sometimes hidden, sometimes plain as day, that shape society.

I’m coming to terms with the label of utopian fiction. Resonant Earth imagines an alternate history of Reconstruction after the U.S. Civil War being successful. In other words, formerly enslaved people gain full citizenship and civil rights. Women were a key part of the abolitionist movement, so I also imagined that they won the right to vote and full participation in civic life and the economy. Imagine if America could wake itself from all its awful, destructive, and painful -isms by the turn of the century (and by that I mean 1900). What kind of world would we live in today?

It’s very easy to become pessimistic about the future of humanity. Global conflict, biosphere degradation, the simply terrifying physics of climate change—who is going to save the world from such calamities? The answer is that each of us as individuals can come together to implement solutions. If I can’t live in utopia, at least I can write about one, live there in my imagination, and bring that creativity and resolve back into the real world.