Shhh! Please don’t tell the anti-Amazon crowd, but I just purchased the novel
Forbidden Cargo (EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing, 2006), written by author and science education enthusiast
Rebecca K. Rowe, for my Kindle e-book reader. A finalist in the Colorado Book Awards when it was first published, here’s the promotional piece for
Forbidden Cargo posted on Amazon:
It’s 2110 and Creid Xerkler, the creator of the Molecular Advantage Machine — a virtual system that facilitates instantaneous access to all of humanity’s knowledge and experience — is unwillingly entangled in a government Council plot to prove the existence of an illegally engineered race called the Imagofas. Unfortunately Xerkler knows more than he should and fears what the Council might discover.
The Imagofas are revered by many as the next step in human evolution — a nano-DNA hybrid: part human, part machine — but to the Council they are a dangerous aberration and a threat to the very existence of humankind. In their quest to prove this crime against humanity, the Council plans on abducting specimens from the Order sanctioned research facility on Mars.
When the kidnapping takes an unexpected turn and the Imagofas are forced to become fugitives, the Council vows to destroy them — while others plan to capitalize on their existence. The Imagofas, in a determined bid to return to Mars, must draw upon their still developing and unique skills to survive the dangers of Earth.
Along the way, they are helped by three unexpected and unlikely heroes: the Cadet, a hard core gamer; Ochbo, a cleanlife pervert; and Prometheus, an enlightenment seeking MAMintelligence, who, while on his own secret quest, ultimately holds the answers to everyone’s survival.
Rebecca K. Rowe is a freelance writer, published author and member of the National Space Society and
The Mars Society. She has M.A.'s in Journalism and International Relations. Her short work/poetry has been published in
Polyphony,
Ascent Magazine and
Sol Magazine. Rebecca is a graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers' Workshop.
In short, Harpold concludes that Verne’s lack of interest in Mars is attributed to the “fundamental patterns” of Verne's fiction, which describe “paths, not places. Narrative action in the novels is tightly, we might say obsessively, bound to systems of motion. These may be halting, digressive, or recursive -- but things in Verne's fictional universe are always moving.”
