Two Weeks Until BUSTED SYNAPSES!!!

November 3, 2020 is almost upon us, which marks a momentous event of great importance to everyone: The release of my rural cyberpunk novella Busted Synapses! The pre-orders have been open for some time now and will let you get a copy early, and there's also links to it on Powell's and Amazon. Here's what some people are saying about it:

"Satifka effortlessly packs a full adventure into a limited page count. Readers will be hooked." --Publisher's Weekly "Johnny Mnemonic goes Millennial. Cyberpunk is not dead, and Erica Satifka is its queen.” --Silvia Moreno Garcia, Mexican Gothic

"Busted Synapses is the cyberpunk cry of Generation Screwed—a shrewd look at transhumanism through the lens of insurmountable debt and a thoroughly dehumanized workforce. A stunning novella from a unique voice in the literary class war." --Meg Elison, The Book of the Unnamed Midwife

"What constitutes a human life? Erica Satifka asks that monster of a question in Busted Synapses, and the answers offered aren’t for the faint. With poignant sensitivity and science-fictional rigor, Satifka proves herself an uncanny
chronicler of the huan—and inhuman—condition.” --Jason Heller, Strange Stars

So what's Busted Synapses about? Like the Publisher's Weekly review said, there's a lot going on here. You can read a little about the things that inspired the novella in my piece on the Speculative Chic blog, but basically I wanted to write a story in a genre known for a particular kind of grungy, industrial, urban setting and instead place it in the kind of town that the great march to the future leaves behind, a town like Wheeling, West Virginia. In the world of Busted Synapses. the major cities are run by the Solfind Corporation, which has showed up in a handful of my published stories (and yes, they all interconnect). But these high-tech enclaves aren't for regular people, an injustice that call center employee Jess Novotny painfully learns when she's priced out of the newly bought "island city" of Pittsburgh. Into this despair-ridden world steps Alicia, one of the androids who's succeeded in making humans like Jess redundant, but who wants nothing more than to blend in with the denizens of Wheeling, including small-time drug dealer Dale Carter.

And that's just the first couple of chapters!

Busted Synapses also has a Goodreads page, so if you're planning to read it please pop on over to add it
to your list. While Busted Synapses tells a complete story, I have many ideas for future stories and novels set in this world, and there's a much better chance of that happening if this book does well. So pick up 2020's best rural cyberpunk novella set in West Virginia, before reality catches up to it completely.