Margaret & Doug Sharp's Channel Zilch Studios
Astronaut Mick Oolfson shitcans his dream career by stunt-flying a shuttle during re-entry. When testosterone-surfing geek goddess Heloise Chin offers him an astronaut gig on Channel Zilch – a pirate spacecasting sat – she skewers Mick’s heart and glands with her green, green eyes and he commits to the long shot mission (and Hel) even though it means committing felonies. Ex-SEAL Tobias Ishwald, who washed out of Mick's astronaut class, is now head of NASA security and when Mick steals Enterprise in front of his family Ishwald vows to recover the shuttle and feed Mick dick-first into a pencil sharpener. With the deity-caliber assistance of billionaire Trekkie Merzifon Karabuk, the Zilch team smuggles Enterprise toward Kazakhstan aboard the reeking freighter Potent Bull, skirmishing constantly with Ishwald who deploys the full resources of the US Navy to hunt them down. At Baikonur Cosmodrome Mick must ally with depraved cyberczar Gogol in a gangster power struggle which turns lethal when Mick launches Enterprise in a fusillade of Mafiya bullets.
Channel Zilch is a 96k-word near-future sci-fi caper with heart and purpose, the first book of The Geek Rapture Project. CZ ranges from the utopian hubris of Singulatarians to NASA’s policy on cannibalism to the throbbing edge of erotobotics. Zilch is populated by a cast of sharply-etched oddballs such as pistol-packing fetish doll Nurse Motorcade and hypnotic newscaster Richard Head, who can make an oatmeal recipe sound like the biggest news since Madonna bore Limbaugh’s love child – just don’t call him Dick.
Hel's Bet: Book II of The Geek Rapture Project
Book 3 of The Geek Rapture Project is War on Death.
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My other projects are at Channel Zilch Studios.
GEEKS: Check out the OpenCog Open Source AGI Project