Dancing with Eternity - Softcover

John Patrick Lowrie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1603818103 ISBN 13: 9781603818100

Publisher: Camel Press, 2011

Synopsis

What would happen if Odysseus met Captain Ahab in the Fortieth Century? Only Captain Ahab is a beautiful woman named Steel who owns her own starship and Odysseus is an unemployed actor named Mohandas who's stuck on the backside of a backwater moon because he won't pay his taxes. Oh, and everybody-well, almost everybody-lives forever, did I mention that? And there's a telepathic Internet that allows the entire population of the galaxy to communicate at will and even experience the world from another person's perspective.  Dancing with Eternity is a sprawling galactic odyssey that takes Steel, Mo and the crew of the starship Lightdancer on an incredible voyage of adventure, self-discovery, and revelation.  ... And they get to go to a lot of really cool planets, too.

About this title

About the Author:

John Patrick Lowrie was born in 1952 in Honolulu, Hawaii and raised in Boulder, Colorado. At 16 he left home to make his way as a singer/guitarist/flautist/trombonist in a rock ‘n’ roll band, sleeping in parks and communes and getting to know several hippies. After surviving the draft, he graduated with highest distinction from the Indiana University School of Music and for a few years managed to make a living as a composer and guitarist in his acoustic fusion duo, The Kiethe Lowrie Duet, garnering critical acclaim and opening for people who were much more famous than he was. He then decided to become an actor because the pay was better and the work was steadier. To this day he remains the only person he knows of who has done this. He met Ellen McLain, his wife of twenty-four years, in Arnhem, Holland on a European tour of a Broadway show and started his acting career in Palermo, Italy telling jokes to an opera house full of Sicilians who didn’t speak English. Success continues to dog his heels like an angry Pekinese. He and his wife now reside in Seattle where they divide their professional time between acting in live theater and voice-acting for computer games and radio dramas.

Review:

ForeWord Firsts debut fiction winner 2011

"Dancing With Eternity is about life and death. It is also about love and loneliness, pain and joy, and what could happen if those experiences and emotions wither away. Most of all, the book is about loss loss of intimacy, of loved ones, and of connections to other people as a result of technology.
Readers of the genre will likely recognize the influences of Olaf Stapledon, Fred Pohl, Cordwainer Smith, and other writers from the early years of American science fiction. Lowrie has taken those influences and kneaded them into his own life experiences to produce a story that is at once fantastic and recognizable, populated by real people with real dilemmas against a backdrop of stellar travel and adventure. This novel well deserves its selection as the inaugural ForeWord Firsts winner."
--J.G. Stinson

"... a travelogue in the best tradition of A. E. van Vogt's Voyage of the Space Beagle." ----Robert Enstrom

"Every once in a while, a new novel comes along that is both epic in scope and, at the same time, focused on a very personal, human drama. John Patrick Lowrie's characters do indeed dance with eternity in a universe where humankind thinks it has mastered immortality. They believe technology has solved all problems . . . This dense story is far richer than a capsule summary can suggest. In the best tradition of the best science fiction, the galactic setting is painted with vivid, believable detail. "
-- Dr. Wesley Britton, bookpleasures.com

"Stellar debut; this is science fiction at its best Dancing with Eternity ... the first mind blowing 2011 science fiction novel I did not previously know about ... superb world building ... pitch perfect ... (A++, top 10 novel of 2011) a stellar debut that shows why science fiction is still the most interesting genre of today."

--Liviu Suciu, Fantasy Book Critic

"In the far flung future, the human experience is a much different one indeed. Dancing with Eternity is a science fiction novel set in the fortieth century and following the misadventures and failures of Mohandas in an otherwise more perfect universe. Humorous and thoughtful, Dancing with Eternity may prove a fun read for science fiction fans with a strong interest in deep space travel and other elements of the far flung future."

--Midwest Book Review/Small Press Bookwatch

"Two thousand years from now, people don't die; they just reboot, choosing what to remember, what to forget. The results are not always what they or we expect. In Dancing with Eternity, John Lowrie has imagined a richly detailed world of space travel among colonized planets by characters whose minds and bodies alike are malleable, the specs stored on the 'net' and retrievable when necessary. The storytelling in this novel is lush and highly imaginative, and backed by the author s encyclopedic knowledge of our world and his deep understanding of what makes us human."

--Jerry Stubblefield, author of Homunculus (Black Heron Press)

"Dancing With Eternity by John Patrick Lowrie is not only a terrific E-ticket ride of speculative fiction, it is also a very thought-provoking novel of ideas. I got swept away by the scope of the story, and spent many hours contemplating the moral, ethical and social challenges of 'rebooting.' Anyone who enjoys reading either Kim Stanley Robinson or Neal Stephenson will get a big kick out of this book!"

----Hugh Hastings, Actor

"In Dancing With Eternity John has constructed the idyllic science fiction novel with all the elements that real fans crave: adventure, mystery, space travel, alien worlds, hard science projections, and a wonderful cast of characters from a future society. But, more important, the book dances with timeless philosophical questions which may require hard-thinking, real-life answers much sooner than we realize."

--Frank Simcoe, author, Ridiculous Destiny

"An utterly believable depiction of other worlds and races, imagination drips from every page. John Patrick Lowrie has more talent than any human being has a right to possess. A triumph of science fiction. I only wish I'd written it!"

--M J Elliott, Editor of The Whisperer in Darkness, The Horror in the Museum, The Right Hand of Doom, The Haunter of the Ring

"As an ex-NASA tether specialist and consultant on the Shuttle tether missions, I found this a refreshingly accurate narrative of what it might be like to experience such life and related activities that (are) outside our normal realms."

--Dave Lang

"As I was enjoying this book, stepping through a delightful minefield of lifeless sacred cows, I found the advanced computer concepts presented within assembling themselves in actual experiments in the real world without!"

--Chuck Pliske, former NASA Computer Engineer

"At a time in which we are increasingly uncertain about our future, Lowrie creates a plausible scenario in which there is no death as we now experience it, and explores how such a world would play out. In the process he challenges our traditional beliefs about love, sex and spirituality."

--Janet Pliske, D.D.

"Dancing with Eternity is a fascinating sci-fi thriller that depicts the world as it might be in the future .... It is a fairly quick read because the flow of the storyline keeps you fascinated and intrigued. This is one book that sci-fi enthusiasts should put on their "must-read" list."

----Tracey Rock for Reader Views

About this edition

• Publisher: Camel Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1603818103
• ISBN 13: 9781603818100
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 416