A Pause in the Perpetual Rotation

by Vincent H. O'neil, Henry V. O'neil

Overview

"... the main action manages to capture the imagination and hold it. The main players are developed well over the course of the narrative, and the book's dialogue, especially, rings true and is consistently snappy and readable." -- Kirkus Reviews

In the future, robots do all the work and there is no need for jobs or money. Everyone gets just about everything they want, and the government emphasizes societal contentment.

Some people seek more purpose in their lives, and feel they found this in a philosophy called The Unused Path. The belief system stresses self-discovery, and the government is starting to see it is a threat to contentment.

And anything that challenges the social order is not tolerated for long.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781737824510
Publisher:	FNG Press
Publication date:	09/29/2021
Series:	The Unused Path , #2
Pages:	324
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.68(d)

About the Author

Vincent H. O'Neil brings a wealth of life experience to his writing. Over the years he has served as a paratrooper, a consultant, a risk manager, and an apprentice librarian.

A native of Massachusetts, he is a graduate of West Point and The Fletcher School.

His Malice Award-winning debut novel, Murder in Exile, was the first book in the Frank Cole mystery series from St. Martin’s Press.

Writing as Henry V. O’Neil, he published his five-novel science fiction Sim War series with Harper Collins.

He’s written two horror novels, Interlands and Denizens, and a theatre-themed mystery called Death Troupe.

His short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies, as well as Escape Pod, Mystery Weekly, Hypnos, Bourbon Penn, Mystery Tribune, and Scene4 magazines.


www.vincenthoneil.com

Editorial Reviews

2022-03-09
A parable in which unrest comes to a neatly hierarchical future state.

In the future world thatO’Neil imagines, society underwent a grand Reorganization a generation ago and is now carefully organized into levels of affluence. In Tier One are the Swells, who live in gated communities and have their every need or want quickly attended to by attentive “artificial intelligence entities”; they’re also guarded by the omnipresent, robotic Mech Marshals who enforce the law. On Tier Two are the Shoals, who likewise enjoy comfortable lives with all of their needs met, although perhaps less quickly or urgently than the people in Tier One. And finally, there’s Tier Three—the vast majority of the population, known as Sands, who are mostly contentedly idle and want for nothing, although they enjoy fewer luxuries; sometimes they provide luxuries for others in the form of Sands-made items, which are coveted by the upper Tiers for their supposed authenticity. Against this backdrop, readers meet the human law enforcement officer Lansing, his investigative AI partner (named “Partner”), and 15-year-old Traxter, a follower of an underground philosophical movement aimed at undercutting the seemingly perfect world society. One of Traxter’s instructors warns him about their AI helpers: “They meet all our needs. They spread us out. They teach us to behave. So they can ignore us.” Indeed, the darker reality underlying all the supposed contentment is stressed repeatedly over the course of the narrative: “The AIs are slowly cutting humans out of the decision cycle,” Lansing warns at one point. “We don’t make any sense to them, and they see our control as interference.” In an unusual wrinkle, O’Neil’s novel is a companion piece to on an earlier nonfiction work by the same author. In The Unused Path(2021), he outlined a straightforward philosophy of life for readers to consider when they’re confronted with potentially corrosive complexities of the modern world. In this new novel, “the Unused Path” is intriguingly employed as the name of a dissident group disrupting the seemingly flawless society; it’s also the name of that group’s philosophy of nontechnological mindfulness, which features such mantras as “Develop your mind,” “Spend time alone with your thoughts,” and “Specificity contributes to accuracy.” Readers don’t need to read the first book in order to appreciate this one, but the use of such textual interconnectedness does make the somewhat familiarplot—about fugitives in a blandly perfect environment finding an off-the-grid, subversive alternative—more compelling than it would ordinarily be. Various subplots feel, more or less, like afterthoughts, but the main action manages to capture the imagination and hold it. The main players are developed well over the course of the narrative, and the book’s dialogue, especially, rings true and is consistently snappy and readable. The worldbuilding is thorough and internally consistent, as well, although many readers may wish the author had offered more specific details about the Reorganization that lies at the heart of the work.

An often enjoyable, if slightly formulaic, SF novel about breaking away from a collective.

Kirkus Reviews