Today it's my turn on the BlogTour iRemember by S.V. Bekvalac.
For a limited time, iRemember will be available for only 99p.
SV Bekvalac was born in 1987 in Croatia, in what was then Yugoslavia, but grew up in London.
She studied German and Russian at Oxford, and went to film school in Prague. After almost becoming a film-maker and then an academic, researching cities and films, she found herself writing fiction about cities instead. She started off with screenplays and short stories, but they got longer and longer. iRremember is her first novel.
She has lived in cities all over Europe. Now she lives in London, or in one of her own imaginary cities.
About the book
The city of iRemember shimmers in the desert haze, watched over by the Bureau, a government agency that maintains control through memory surveillance and little pink pills made from the narcotic plant Tranquelle.
It looks like an oasis under its geodesic dome, but the city is under siege. ‘Off-Gridder’ insurgents are fighting to be forgotten.
Bureau Inspector Icara Swansong is on a mission to neutralise the threat. Her investigation leads her into iRemember’s secret underbelly, where she finds herself a fugitive from the very system she had vowed to protect. She has to learn new rules: trust no one. Behind every purple Tranquelle stalk lurk double-agents.
A sci-fi noir with a psychedelic twist, iRemember explores the power the past holds over us and the fragility of everything: what is, what once was, and what will be.
Off-Gridders - the rebels, the anarchists and those who want to stay way under the invasive radar of the powers that be. The people determined to stop their every thought, but especially their bad thoughts from being uploaded and stored on government servers. They then sit and wait until the need arises to use them.
Lucien Ffogg is part of the resistance, well technically it's more about profit and less about fighting for the cause, but perhaps somewhere in that grumpy stubborn brain there lives a tiny rebel. The last thing Lucien wants or needs is a government official turning up to put the entire compound he is tasked with maintaining, a Memory Processing Plant in the middle of a desert, to put him and the site under scrutiny.
Inspector Icara Swansong knows deep down in her bones that Ffogg - double ff and double gg - is up to something. She just hasn't been able to find out what and where, aside from the clear signs of neglect and age that is.
It becomes a battle of minds, although it's interesting that neither of the characters evokes super negative emotions, perhaps because it is easy to understand both views.
It's speculative sci-fi with a dystopian flair.
Bekvalac pits the two main characters against each other in a cat and mouse game of deception and revelations. A game that leads them to a surprising escalation and an endgame neither of them expects.
The world-building is extensive and intricate, and the premise is intriguing. Being held hostage by your own thoughts and memories, something you are unable to control and yet others want to use them to control you. Quite a read.
Buy iRemember at Amazon Uk or go to Goodreads for any other retailer. Publisher: Lightning Books; pub date 30 Mar. 2020. Buy at Amazon com.
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