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Seismic Sedition: The Heinous Crimes of Professor Terry Joyner by D.T.E. Madden

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Crimes against volcanic pizza stones, verbal violence, dissent against Siberian-American reindeer herders, people stealing other people’s voices by agreeing with them — these are just some of the absurdities and hilariously extreme forms of political correctness to be found in Seismic Sedition: The Heinous Crimes of Professor Terry Joyner, a satirical sci-fi novel by D.T.E. Madden set in a mask-wearing, post-COVID-19 Chicago. 

Associate Professor Terry Joyner wants tenure at the university where he works, despite the fact that his career prospects could be better described as tenuous. Although he’s gotten in trouble for it before, he’s once again modified the school’s seismometer to make it more sensitive, and sure enough, he finds something rumbling under the surface of the area that no other machine is picking up. But what exactly has he detected? And is his modification faulty or is he an engineering genius?

It seems like the latter when, a few days later, part of Chicago’s South Side district suddenly explodes, and he had predicted the seismic events that led to it on Twitter during a “gin-fueled and homegrown-cannabis-enhanced” tweetstorm of theories. This could be Terry’s ticket to the recognition — and tenure  — he’s been looking for. He’s asked to be a science expert on TV, and his tweets are being discussed on the radio and retweeted everywhere.

THE QUICK TRIP FROM FAME TO INFAMY

But his sudden fame brings him to the attention of a brand-new, frightening government agency called the Bias Incident Rapid Response Unit (BIRRU), tasked with eliminating all “bias incidents” from academia. The agency comes after Terry, cutting him off from his job and research and calling him into the proceedings of ridiculous hearings, threatening everything in his life he holds dear.

And then Terry witnesses a second explosive event at the same place as the first. He’s branded as “a rogue alt scientist” by the very media who previously adored him. Things can’t get much worse, and then they do.

Pursued constantly by the BIRRU, befriended by a wild bunch of characters, Terry tries to hide the evidence, get his job back, tell the truth and not get arrested. He ends up variously underground, investigating another explosion, explaining why Serena Williams is the greatest baseball player of all time, and befriending a hacker who thinks he’s Ice-T.

It’s a mad, mad world where Terry emerges as a lone beacon of sanity. Filled with a cast of colorful characters and outrageous situations, Seismic Sedition is a near-future, tongue-in-cheek send-up of government bureaucrats, academics and the media — with a dose of earth-science geekery that’s sure to please science fiction fans as well.

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Seismic Sedition: The Heinous Crimes of Professor Terry Joyner by D.T.E. Madden
Genre: Fiction
Author: D.T.E. Madden
Gevera Bert Piedmont

Gevera Bert Piedmont has longed all her life to be known for just one thing. She never did figure out what that thing was, however, jumping from healer to teacher to non-fiction writer to artist to fiction writer and beyond (she is still jumping). She passionately loves cats, fish, frogs, lizards, birds, dinosaurs, the ancient Meso-American calendar, and Cthulhu Mythos monsters, and also shiny colorful things with gears. She wishes she had been a Deep One, but in the end, she was just slightly peculiar, crafty and tentacled, with a laptop. Bert has been described as having "a fierce intellect that wouldn't quit" and her fiction has been lauded as "concise, succinct and complete." Her most recent book is The Maw and Other Time Traveling Lizard Tales, a collection of short stories set in her Time Traveling Lizards universe. Bert lives in the Connecticut wilderness (but not far from a grocery store) with a husband, cats, fish, frogs, and an impressive collection of rubber lizards. Check out her many online havens here.

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