Author: O.E. Tearmann
Narrator: Kirt Graves
Length: 13 hours and 16 minutes
Series: Aces High, Jokers Wild, Book 1
Publisher: Amphibian Press
Released: Jun. 28, 2019
Genre: Technothriller; Cyberpunk; LGBT
Sex. Drones. Rock and roll. Aidan Headly never wanted to be the man giving orders. That’s fine with the Democratic State Force base he’s been assigned to command: they don’t like to take orders. Nicknamed the Wildcards, they used to be the most effective base against the seven Corporations owning the former United States in a war that has lasted over half a century. Now the Wildcards are known for creative insubordination, chaos, and commanders begging to be reassigned. Aidan is their last chance. If he can pull off his assignment as Commander and yank his ragtag crew of dreamers and fighters together, maybe they can get back to doing what they came to do: fighting for a country worth living in. Life’s a bitch. She deals off the bottom of the deck. But you play the hands you’re given.
O.E. Tearmann lives in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains, in what may become the Co-Wy Grid. They share the house with a brat in fur, a husband and a great many books. Their search engine history may garner them a call from the FBI one day. When they’re not living on base 1407 they advocate for a more equitable society and more sustainable agricultural practices, participate in sundry geekdom and do their best to walk their characters’ talk.
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Kirt Graves has 20+ years of experience as a stage actor & vocal performer. His first audiobook was featured as an Audible Five-Star Fave.
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I received this audiobook as part of my participation in a blog tour with Audiobookworm Promotions. The tour is being sponsored by O.E. Tearmann. The gifting of this audiobook did not affect my opinion of it.
O.E. Tearmann’s Ten Reasons To Listen To This Book
- Listen because Kirt Graves absolutely rocks. No, I mean it. As a narrator, Kirt has done a fantastic job of nailing everything from the somewhat shifting voice of Aidan, a trans man, to Janice, a former agricultural worker whose scathing drawl can skin a donkey. He nailed the voice of a tiny woman with a stutter, a baby and a ten-year old. And they were all absolutely perfect.
- Listening to this book will give you hope. It was begun as a response to the disheartened apathy of 2016. It felt as if everyone was assuming that we were going downhill, and that the erosion of America was inevitable.
- Okay, fine. Then let’s write the darkest incarnation of America we can envision if the country continues down this road. And then let’s write characters who take care of one another, fall in love, and laugh in spite of it.
- That’s the Wildcards: an eighteen-man unit in a force fighting to overthrow the Corporations that run America and restore democracy to the country. They are fighters. They are dreamers. They are a family. And they are going to kick the world’s ass together.
- Listen for the laughs
- One of my influences for this series was the classic show MASH 4077, and I’ve drawn on it as a reminder that humor helps people survive dark times. The Wildcards are very smart, sometimes bored, and always up for a laugh. On this base, there are puns. There’s pranks. There’s overwriting one another’s personnel files to make jokes. There’s innuendo and a betting pool on who’s going to fall in love with who. There is some of the funniest cursing you’ve ever heard.
- Listen for a love story you don’t see every day.
- As Aidan and Kevin perform a slow and sometimes awkward courtship, they trip and stumble more than once. But they also work to understand and support one another. They both act with compassion. And they give each other the gifts of their truths. This highly inclusive LGBT story showcases romance between people who society too often ignores. These stories are worthy of being heard.
- Listen for the sex.
- Oh, yes. There is sex. Very fun, very queer sex.
- Listen for the drones.
- Things get pretty crazy in this climate changed version of Colorado. If dodging attack drones and stealing shipments from Corporate overlords is your thing, this is your book.
- Listen for the rock and roll
- Kevin is a hopeless history geek. Living in 2155, he adores the 1980s. Get ready for screwy references and hollered Bon Jovi lyrics.
- Listen for a different kind of hero, and a different kind of leadership.
- Aidan isn’t the leader you expect. He’s quiet. Self effacing. He doesn’t give many orders, and he doesn’t do much shouting. But his quiet presence draws his people into the tight knit unit that they need to be, and his kind of leadership showcases a different, less harmful way to be a leader.
- Listen to the warning of America’s future
- Between climate change, the for-profit nature of American society and the mind-numbingly pervasive ads on the city Grids, the version of America in these books is not a fun place to live. How it ended up there is discussed. I wrote this as a warning. Let’s not end up there.
- Listen to the dreams
- This world may be grim, but it lays out a path forward that we can follow. Together, we can rise. Let ‘The Hands We’re Given’ prove it to you.
Genetic Testing
Genetic testing. Gene tailoring. Helping humanity. Or…not? Genetic tinkering is something I play with entirely too much in The Hands We’re Given and its sequels in the Aces High, Jokers Wild series. The possibilities of gene tailoring sound great…until you realize that every genetic flaw will become a moral failing. When perfect becomes possible, imperfect becomes criminal. We see it already: I’ve caught myself thinking ‘wow…didn’t your parents care about that?’ when I see an adult with crooked teeth. We extoll clear skin and lustrous hair. Thousands of trees have died for magazines that tell us that we just have to drink more water, exercise, and eat our vegetables to get smooth skin…they don’t talk about how much money the ladies on their covers spend to get it, though. We confuse moral worth with physical perfection. And in an era when genes can be edited, that may get a lot worse. Those who can’t afford or don’t want to improve their children will be listed as criminally negligent. And you have to wonder what it’ll do to our sense of humanity. Well, some people have to wonder. I have to write In The Hands We’re Given, I’ve loved playing with the power, the costs and the downfalls of genomic tailoring. In 2155, drugs are tailored to your personal genome, which improves their effectiveness many times over. But your genome is also used against you. For example, the medical Cavanaugh Corporation, which has publicly stated that its aim is to perfect humanity. Genetic ‘aberration’ is treated as a punishable offense by Corporation-contracted workers: after all, they’re removing future profits by producing children that will have lower productivity. ‘Aberrant’ children with preventable genetic issues (and the list of preventable issues is very, very long) are listed as cases of neglect. Babies born ‘aberrant’ to mothers who could not afford gene optimizing are removed from the home, under the Aberrant Progeny Policy. For the company’s upper management, gene optimizing is compulsory. I explore these issues in writing the character of Kevin McIllian. Kevin was born into a family belonging to the upper echelons of Cavanaugh’s management structure, and his genome was designed to the specifications of a Corporate board. His brain chemistry and function should have been optimized in vitro as well, but his parents bribed the technicians to leave his mind alone. He treasures the flaws he bears as a result of the incomplete optimization. They’re his only proof that he is still human; that he still has free will and his own choices to make. He hates the fact that he was designed to meet the standards of a Corporate blueprint. He proudly calls himself ‘aberrant’, and wears the glasses that show off the fact that he’s nearsighted as a small, daily gesture of defiance. He detests the fact that he’s been manipulated since he was conceived by a Corporation that intended to use him. That anger acts as a fuel, pushing him on. And then, of course, we get into the fact that every technology has some mistakes. What legacy will the first genomic experiments leave? Will we get children who are genetically perfect in our first trials? Or will they appear perfect until they begin to have children of their own, and spliced genes begin to mix into the germ lines in unexpected ways? But on the flip side, if we could remove Cri-du-Chat, Parkinson’s, and bad teeth from the gene pool, shouldn’t we? Is refusing to remove a gene for cerebral palsy or cystic fibrosis tomorrow any different from refusing to vaccinate a kid today? Gene editing is a fascinating and terrifying area to look into, because it walks a fine line: on the one hand, the prevention or removal of preventable suffering. On the other hand, the pathologizing of untold numbers of issues. What will end up on the list of ‘preventable genetic disorders’. That’s my greatest question. And, perhaps, my area of most intense interest as a writer. The morally grey area of whether we should genetically modify our children or not can be seen as three intersecting planes. Let’s call Plane 1 the Access Plane. Who has access to these changes? Who is compelled to be changed? I think in our popular imagination we see the “designer baby” trope played out: class and social power are linked to genetic alteration.On the other side of the coin, we see lower class colonists genetically adjusted for their new worlds in the Spin State novels. In my book, poor countries were incentivised to have their children tailored in order to require less food and water. Plane Two, we’ll call the Biological Politics plane. Who gets to determine what needs changing? Is it a democratic choice? Is there a bureaucracy? Is there state intervention when there is a perceived danger to a society? And what’s the danger, exactly? We already see some of these issues around the world. For instance: what do you do in a country that wants more boy children than girls? And what do you call a ‘disease?’ In Russia, being gay’s on that list. If we start getting involved before the children of the future draw their first breaths, things could get…unpleasant. Plane Three is the Plane of Consequences. Beyond looking at the implications of such societies, what are we saying as creators/fans/curators of speculative fiction when we engage with the idea that things like sex/gender/orientation are things that can be tinkered with using genetic technology? Today, academic and medical institutions usually act in ways that perpetuate our current structures of power. It’s the water they swim in. If people could change genomes in the future to suit ‘society’, would they genetically manipulate the population to make sure that men are more intelligent than women? Will they unravel and then erase the genetic triggers for stepping out of the gender binary? And what would that make us, as people? As a writer, it’s my job to ask these questions. I need to hold a mirror up to our society and ask it to look itself in the eye. Like so many things, I don’t want us to label this technology as wholly evil, as writers. Let’s not get out the tar-and-feather kit, as people are already doing for GMO crops. But let’s use our writing to remind people, again: scientific techniques are amoral. They arrive in a box labeled ‘ethics not included’. We have to supply those. Let’s use writing to remind our readers that we must use gene-tailoring tech with the greatest possible breadth of fully experienced life and the least harm as the goals. We don’t need humanity to be perfect. We need it to be as human as possible. Right now I’m working on Book 3 in the series, tentatively titled ‘Raise the Stakes’ and scheduled for a July release. In that book, two of our genetically modified characters face what it means to be what they are. If this sounds like the kind of rabbit hole you’d like to dive down, come hang out at @wildcards1407 on Facebook or follow me on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/O.E.-Tearmann/e/B07J62VX9W
Giveaway: Writer’s Tears whiskey with signed set of books
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