“I felt like I was in Church”

That’s a line attributed, if I recall correctly, to Eddy Vedder when asked about how he felt the first time he played with Neil Young (whose “Cortez the Killer” is playing through my headphones right now, now that you mention it, as it often does when I’m digging into basso philisophico depth of my own poor over-mined skull).

I didn’t feel like I was in church when I met uber-scientist George Church in his Harvard Med School lab/office six weeks ago, but I did feel a little bit awed and of course impressed. Turns out Church is a nice guy and we had a lovely chat. (How we met & what we talked about is a story for another day; all you CCD buffs might want to brush up on The Bremser Spam; that’s a hint.) I left behind a set of my books, and, somewhat to my surprise, he read them, and what’s more, liked them, and we’ve since become email buddies and we talk about this and that — subject to time constraints, of course, inasmuch as I’m an unemployed sometime novelist and he’s a world-famous scientist in charge of several important projects at various laboratories, not to mention being on the boards of too many companies to count, so sometimes I don’t have as much free time on my hands as he does.
Anyway I was so flattered that George @geochurch created a twitter account at my request just to pimp my novel The Pains! (Thanks, bro!)

I’ve since gotten half a dozen emails from random twitter people out there on earth saying, “Did you realize that George Church’s inaugural (so far only) tweet was about your books?”

I feel so special!

So anyway, as long as I’m here namedropping how George Church likes my books, let me cast modesty to the winds and cite his kind note on Amazon about my latest book, The Pains

John (some middle name) Sundman’s third novel, “The Pains”, gets the reader amazingly quickly into a jarringly jamais vu/deja vu world — especially for aficionados of Orwell’s 1984 and Christian doctrine. While refreshingly different in style from his previous “Acts of the Apostles” and “Cheap Complex Devices”, you can find a “meta” component that adds to the puzzles in each one. Sundman is a master of machines — computing, biological and political — including details that will convince an expert, and yet entrance a distant outsider with a compelling page-turner plot. Not just plot and mechanisms, but unforgettable personalities that haunt us long after the pages stop. We must now suffer the pain of waiting for his next book (“Creation Science”).

(I presumed to fix a coupla typos. Geo, let me know if I overstepped :^))

Now, all y’all other mortals, heed, listen, and most importantly, buy!

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• Attention Geeks: Free books!
• Some painful things & a request
• Do it yourself publlishing — R.W. Ridley style
• Ass over teakettle and a farewell to free ebooks
• The Realpolitic of Bits — More of Cory Doctorow's conversation with Wetmachine

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