RISE OF HYPNODROME | mfuchs-writer

RISE OF HYPNODROME

Publisher: Chicago Center for Literature & Photography

Release Date: February 16, 2015

It’s 2039, and a political faction called the Lifestyle Party has risen to power under the Presidency of Deepak Chopra. The new government bans scientific innovation and introduces a set of policies focused entirely on maximizing personal happiness. So why is Grady Tenderbath so unhappy? Believing that he’s fallen short of his professional potential, he buys a personal robot muse to nurture his talent and ego, while his wife Karen, a genetic scientist, becomes more entrenched in her lab. But just when Grady seems on track to solve his career crisis, he discovers a new problem: he’s swooning for the empathetic yet artificial Ashley. Not only that, he’s distracted by haunting visions of Karen transforming into...something else. Half speculative fiction and half marriage thriller, Rise of Hypnodrome explores how future generations might draw from the realm of epigenetic engineering to eventually control their own biology. Whether human or robot, the characters in this cutting-edge science-fiction novella have one thing in common: an irrepressible desire to evolve.

PRAISE FOR RISE OF HYPNODROME:

“Imagine a mash-up of the murderous marital politics of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and the AI-driven soft-focus romanticism of Spike Jonze’s Her with a dash of Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot and the contemporary self-help culture spearheaded by real-life lifestyle guru Deepak Chopra. Done? What you just imagined is probably something like Matt Fuchs’s s debut novella, Rise of Hypnodrome … This is a dystopia rooted, in the best of ways, in our current moment.”

Atticus Review

“Complex world-building and character analysis in a quick span of time, like the best anthologies.”

Joe Crowe, co-founder of RevolutionSF

“Fuchs offers us a crazy story full of robots, new age dictators, ultra-evolved humans, frustrated literary editors and even dreampunk droplets. Rise of Hypnodrome is brilliantly written with clever dialogue, a tone that brushes the post-modern with great doses of humor.”

Sense of Wonder

“This is a wonderful take on a near-future ... For a novella, Fuchs is still able to squeeze in a ton of worldbuilding. I enjoyed his take on the future and hope to see more strong sci-fi from him in the future."

Ebook Reviewer

“Ultimately, you can’t pinpoint a genre in Rise of Hypnodrome because of too many additional elements, and that’s what makes this book so great. After all, while it is about robot love affairs, it’s also inherently about science and politics too–specifically, evolution."

Benham Riahi, Editor of Twilight of the Idiots

MATT FUCHS