BooksChatter: ☀ Ghosts in the Machine: The Babel Trilogy [2]

Thursday, 22 September 2016

☀ Ghosts in the Machine: The Babel Trilogy [2] - Richard Farr

Thank you for joining us on the Virtual Book Tour for Ghosts in the Machine, a Young Adult Science Fiction novel by Richard Farr (20 September 2016, Skyscape, 414 pages).

This is the second book in The Babel Trilogy.

Don't miss our interview with author Richard Farr.

PREVIEW: Check out the book's synopsis and excerpt below. Read various excerpts with Amazon Look Inside.

Ghosts in the Machine is FREE on Kindle Unlimited and Kindle Owner's Lending Library.

Author Richard Farr will be awarding five print copies of Ghosts in the Machine to randomly drawn winner via Rafflecopter during the tour. Please do take part: comment on our post and follow the tour where you will be able to read other excerpts (☀), interviews (ℚ), reviews (✍) and guest blog posts (✉).

Synopsis | Teaser | The Series | Author Q&A | About the Author | Giveaway & Tour Stops

Synopsis

Young genius Morag Chen doesn’t believe in the supernatural. Or not until a thousand gods show up in front of her, appearing from a clear-blue sky. The Architects are terrifying, they’re hypnotically attractive, and they’re real—but what are they, and what do they want, and why have they stolen the mind of Daniel Calder, the person she is closest to?

Ancient gods? Invading aliens? Everyone has a theory, but no one has guessed the truth. In this dark, suspenseful, mind-bending sequel to The Fire Seekers, Morag picks up the narration from Daniel as she works to accept that there’s more than one way to think about the nature of humanity. And she will find that the only way forward is through secrets that Daniel himself seems desperate but unable to convey.

A mysterious lab. The house of a dying billionaire. The hidden home of a strange and forgotten people. In each of these places, Morag and Daniel will come a step closer to answers, hope, and a way of fighting back.

Teaser: Excerpt

     You were standing motionless on the snow, like all the others, with your face tilted up toward the sky and your hands raised in greeting.
     “There!” I shouted.
     Mack didn’t hear me, which wasn’t surprising—I was competing with 130 decibels. I leaned across the instrument panel, pointed, and shouted again. “There! Daniel and Rosko. Do you see?”
     Wrestling with the controls, struggling to make the big machine do his bidding, he glanced to his left and nodded. Even in that moment of life-threatening crisis there was an aura of relaxed control about him.
     “Go,” he mouthed, even before the helicopter’s wheels had made contact with the pad. “Help them. You’ll have to be quick.”
     Snow and ice, stained pink by the evening light, were cascading onto the pad. Smoke and steam were so totally everywhere that you couldn’t tell which was which. As if by magic, Rosko had emerged from the crevasse, covered in blood, and was struggling up the slope toward you from fifty paces away. The Seraphim were standing silently, or chanting, or on the steeper sections they were beginning to stumble and fall as the ground shook. It was still a couple of hours to sunset, but the full moon had risen into view over the shoulder of the mountain, indecently big and close, like an airbrushed fantasy planet from the cover of an old comic book. Not far to our right, Mount Ararat’s first lava flow in centuries was hissing and sliding—a lazy, venomous, red- eyed snake, mooching for new victims.
     And—And—It was hard not to stand there in the doorway and just stare. The sky, which should have been blue, was turning before our eyes into an upside-down oil-black lake. And a thousand gods—spirits, disembodied souls, angels, demons, Architects, what the hell did I know?—were swirling and foaming and materializing out of it, taking on human and yet not-human shapes as they dripped down toward the shiny, bright faces of the entranced, eager-for-immortality Believers. That counts as a Don’t-Miss, Five Stars, Bucket-List roadside attraction, don’t you think? But it grabs your attention even more, when it contradicts everything you’ve ever believed, because your whole life you’ve been a science- minded, unapologetically rationalist, don’t-give-me-that-crap atheist.
     This is not happening. That’s what I said to myself. Morag, this is so so so not bloody happening. It’s just an illusion. A hallucination. An extra- deluxe, high-octane, ultra-high-pixel-density nightmare.
     I hate it, D; I totally hate it when I don’t believe a single word I’m telling myself.

Ghosts in the Machine
Available NOW!

The Series: The Babel Trilogy

Click on the book cover to Look Inside the book on Amazon and read an excerpt.

The Fire Seekers [1]

The time of our immortality is at hand.

An undeciphered language in Crete. A rash of mysterious disappearances, from Bolivia to Japan. An ancient warning at the ruins of Babel. And a new spiritual leader, who claims that human history as we understand it is about to come to an end.

Seventeen-year-old Daniel Calder’s world falls apart when a freak accident brings personal tragedy—and he discovers there’s a link between the accident and a wildly successful new cult, the Seraphim. Catapulted into a violent struggle for humanity’s past and future, he’s not even sure who the enemy is, or if he’s battling a phantom that doesn’t exist. But as Daniel puts his life on the line, he is forced to conclude that our very survival as a species will depend on who, and what, we choose to believe.

[Published 1 November 2014, 338 pages]

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About the Author

I grew up in England’s West Country, one of the world’s leading producers of strange names for small villages. I now live in Seattle. When I’m not reading, writing, or staring out of the window, I enjoy running, hiking and sea kayaking.

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Giveaway and Tour Stops

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