Category: tech

Sky Full of Elephants by Cebo Campbell

What if every white person in America, suddenly and inexplicably, took their own life.

Imagine, if you will, a new America.

A country where people are happy, tolerant, fulfilled and striving for a better tomorrow. A country where people no longer fear being persecuted, marginalised, or being killed “accidentally” by the police.

Imagine, if you will, a new America — where every single white person has committed suicide, leaving people of colour to remake the country into one of their choosing.

Sky Full of Elephants

Yup, pretty provocative stuff …

The story (loosely) follows the new beginnings of Charlie Brunton — released from prison after serving twenty years after being falsely accused of rape, into a United States where (almost) every white person has walked into the nearest body of water and drowned.

Charlie is working as an engineering lecturer at Howard University, when he gets a phone call from Sidney, the daughter he didn’t know existed.

Sidney needs his help: she wants to head south to Alabama — where she’ll find the last enclave of white people left in the country.

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Machine Man by Max Barry

Well, from the simply outstanding to the absolutely bizarre — and I mean that in a good way.

Max Barry delivers a deceptively simple tale of Charles Neumann, a mechanical engineer who suffers the most bizarre workplace accident while trying to retrieve his mobile phone from an industrial clamping press. Following the amputation of his crushed leg, he spends a few weeks coming to terms with his injury while learning to use a prosthetic.

Machine Man

Being an engineer (and I recognise this trait in soooo many people), Charles realises that the artificial leg is not as good as it should be, so sets about designing that will fix a lot of the shortcomings of prosthetic limbs (including the lack of wi-fi). His place of work is impressed; he finds himself in charge of a department dedicated to designing and building replacement parts for people. And while looking at ways to improve on his work, Charles realises that other parts of the body can be replaced with much better mechanical bits.

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