KINRU
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A man like Birkran Kinru should feel comfortable in a highly-automated world. Birkran likes to be left alone. People make him nervous. With menial labor handled by robots and digital communications making in-person interaction unnecessary, Birkran should be able to enjoy the tech-enabled seclusion. This might be possible, if only he had a permanent home of his own. Instead he must scuttle through the underbelly of the city, from one hiding place to another, knowing the government can watch every move.
Birkran wants nothing to do with politics. He especially wants nothing to do with Corlane Deryala, an ambitious young politician who seems burdened with health problems. Nor does Birkran want any connection to a mysterious hacker with strident anti-government views. Birkran would stay far from these other men, but he seems trapped in a strange connection to both of them. His off-the-record doctor seems motivated to help, but Birkran is left with more questions than answers. Despite his paranoia, people seem to leave him alone... until he realizes that somebody is toying with him for their own benefit. What he learns about the politician and the anarchist opens a surprising new door for Birkran.
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Born and raised in the shadow of more than one volcano, and growing up surrounded by militarily-valuable targets during the Cold War, Stuart J. Whitmore was one misfortune away from sudden death. What better way to escape thoughts of impending doom (or, more likely, boredom from watching too many TV reruns) than writing a novel? His first was written in 9th and 10th grade; before he graduated from high school, he had completed the first draft of his second full-length novel.
With a VIC-20 for a computer at the time, real word processing was not on the horizon for him. Those first two novels (and several later books) were handwritten in spiral notebooks, typically with cheap ballpoint pens. While enjoyable and good practice developing a story, this mode of writing was not a fast route to sharing work with readers beyond family and friends. Writing was eventually pushed aside by career and other "real life" demands.
That career, luckily, resulted in a solid background creating and publishing digital content. Thanks to growth in the e-reader device market, options now exist for writers to rapidly share their stories with a global audience, options never dreamed about in the glow of the 22-character-wide VIC-20 display. Combining his writing and technical background with digital publishing capabilities, Stuart now makes his writings available to readers far beyond his personal circle of contacts.
