Now it can be shown: my editor Lou Anders has posted on the Pyr blog the cover art and synopsis for Geosynchron, the last book in my Jump 225 Trilogy. Here, without further ado, it is. (You can also view a larger version.)

The cover painting is once again by the incomparable Hugo Award-winning artist Stephan Martiniere, whose paintings for the covers of Infoquake and MultiReal have been blowing minds for many a month.

And here is the catalog copy for the book, which provides something of a spoiler (though a necessary one) for the cliffhanger at the end of MultiReal.

DAVID LOUIS EDELMAN’S BUSINESS SCIENCE FICTION SAGA THAT BEGAN WITH INFOQUAKE AND MULTIREAL COMES TO A STUNNING CONCLUSION WITH GEOSYNCHRON, THE LAST BOOK OF THE JUMP 225 TRILOGY.

The Defense and Wellness Council is enmeshed in full-scale civil war between Len Borda and the mysterious Magan Kai Lee. Quell has escaped from prison and is stirring up rebellion in the Islands with the aid of a brash young leader named Josiah. Jara and the apprentices of the Surina/Natch MultiReal Fiefcorp still find themselves fighting off legal attacks from their competitors and from Margaret Surina’s unscrupulous heirs — even though MultiReal has completely vanished.

The quest for the truth will lead to the edges of civilization, from the tumultuous society of the Pacific Islands to the lawless orbital colony of 49th Heaven; and through the deeps of time, from the hidden agenda of the Surina family to the real truth behind the Autonomous Revolt that devastated humanity hundreds of years ago.

Meanwhile, Natch has awakened in a windowless prison with nothing but a haze of memory to clue him in as to how he got there. He’s still receiving strange hallucinatory messages from Margaret Surina and the nature of reality is buckling all around him. When the smoke clears, Natch must make the ultimate decision — whether to save a world that has scorned and discarded him, or to save the only person he has ever loved: himself.

I’ll have more to say about this later, but figured that it couldn’t hurt to just post this stuff asap.

(Oh, and if you’re so inclined, the book’s now available for pre-order on Amazon.)

I’ve always claimed in interviews that it doesn’t really matter whether the actual future resembles the future I wrote about in Infoquake and MultiReal. There are simply too many variables in predicting the future, such that if you do
get it right, it’s largely a matter of luck. But like all authors, I do
secretly harbor this fantasy about the world turning out exactly
like I predicted it, and my books being hailed as visionary tomes
before their time, and my grave becoming a tourist spot for centuries
where young kids with beards hang out writing romantic poetry late at
night.
So it’s comforting to see that the visionary Ray Kurzweil (whose The Age of Spiritual Machines I heartily recommend) has, in effect, completely endorsed my idea of multi technology. Here’s what he says in an interview with GOOD Magazine:

By the late 2020s, nanobots in our brain (that will get
there noninvasively, through the capillaries) will create
full-immersion virtual-reality environments from within the nervous
system. So if you want to go into virtual reality the nanobots shut
down the signals coming from your real senses and replace them with the
signals that your brain would be receiving if you were actually in the
virtual environment. So this will provide full-immersion virtual
reality incorporating all of the senses. You will have a body in these
virtual-reality environments that you can control just like your real
body, but it does not need to be the same body that you have in real
reality. We’ll be able to interact with people in any way in these
virtual-reality environments. That will replace most travel, but we’ll
also have new travel technologies for our real bodies using
nanotechnology.

Contrast that with how I describe the multi network in the appendices for Infoquake:

A multi projection is a virtual body that “exists” in
real space. While the multied body is only an illusion created by
neural manipulation, it can interact with real (”meat”) bodies in a way
almost indistinguishable from physical human interaction…. The multi
network depends on two key components: (1) the trillions of microscopic
bots that process and relay sensory information to the network, and (2)
neural OCHREs that manipulate the mind into “seeing” the sights,
“hearing” the sounds, and “feeling” the sensations of the network.
Similarly, those who interact with multi projections allow neural
manipulation to trick the mind into believing the virtual bodies are
present.

The big difference between good ol’ Ray and me is that a) he
actually knows what he’s talking about, and b) I didn’t figure we’d get
this working for another few hundred years. Kurzweil thinks we’ll be
sending multi projections around the globe about the same time that
Malia Obama gets her Masters degree. I think many of Kurzweil’s
predictions are a tad on the optimistic side — he thinks the
singularity will happen, oh, any day now — but basically sound.
(Thanks to Richard Strayer for pointing out the interview.)

Two more pieces of book promotion for y’all to chew on.

First, I’ve been interviewed by Shaun Farrell for the Adventures in Sci-Fi Publishing podcast. It’s a rather lengthy interview — 30 minutes or so — and it covers everything from whether Natch is the “hero” of Jump 225, why the series is titled Jump 225 in the first place, what is the nature of Natch’s drive to succeed, and why Moonwatcher from 2001 was in a way the first Natch.

Stargate writer and producer Joseph Mallozzi posted my answers to his book club questions about Infoquake recently. The group really seemed to delve into the book and had a very insightful discussion, not only here, but during several days of preceding blog posts. Topics covered include my favorite character, how likely I think the Infoquake future is, and why (or whether) the book ends abruptly. Excerpt:

Iamza writes: “I’m not so sure I really understand MultiReal. As outlined by Margaret, it sounds kind of great — a chance to have things turn out exactly as you wanted. But what happens when the batter wants to hit a six and the bowler wants to get his tenth wicket for no runs (hah, take that, baseball analogies! Give me cricket any day of the week). Whose reality ultimately wins out — or do both batter and bowler split off into separate universes, each achieving their individual goal? For every individual who’s installed the MultiReal program, are there a zillion universes in which things go wrong, and only one in which everything is golden.

DLE: Now you see the big dilemma with MultiReal technology. One of the main subplots in book 2 is how to resolve conflicts very much like you describe. Natch, Jara & Co. discover that there are a lot of broad sociological implications in how MultiReal resolves these conflicts. For instance: how do you charge customers for all those realities? Do you charge a flat fee, or do you charge for each alternate reality they pick? If you choose the latter, does that mean the rich would automatically win every argument?

(Admit it, you’re just making these funny cricket terms up. “The batter wants to hit a six”? “Getting his tenth wicket”? Surely you should not be using such language on a family blog like Mr. Mallozzi’s.)