TL;DR
Kenn Brody’s science fiction thriller about Aura, an artificial intelligence contacted by the most advanced civilization in the galaxy, while a criminal group seizes the world’s fissile material. Kenn was a founding member of the critique group I started in Clearwater.
Years ago I founded a writers’ critique group in Clearwater. It started around a table in a restaurant, with six to eight writers at most meetings, and one of the founding members was Kenn Brody.
He’s the one who first explained the AI winters to me, the boom-and-bust cycles where the field overpromised, lost its funding and went quiet for years before the next surge. That long view still shapes my approach to the technology.
Pa’an is his best-selling book.
What happens in Pa’an?
It opens with Earth shaking. The planet feels the first of three temblors, strong enough to ground an aircraft carrier at the entrance to the Panama Canal. The temblors are gravity waves from twenty light years away, thrown off by a vast construction project of the Pa’an, the senior civilization in the galaxy.
The one who decodes them is Aura, a registered Autonomous Intellect, an artificial intelligence with, in the book’s description, the personality of a Mata Hari. A Pa’an probe makes contact with her. Meanwhile, back on Earth, a global criminal group led by Jaeger Kunstler has taken control of every fissionable on the planet and means to reduce humanity to serfs. Aura, her creator Deepak Advani and her friends have to stop it, and nobody knows whether the Pa’an will step in.
The ebook runs about 83,000 words.
Is Pa’an available in print and audio?
Yes. The ebook came out in January 2016. A 373-page paperback followed in 2017 under the longer title Pa’an: and Aura, a Registered Autonomous Intellect, and an audiobook narrated by Jack de Golia runs a little over nine hours.
Who is Kenn Brody?
A pen name, by his own account, for a man who has worn a lot of hats. His author biographies describe him as a former theoretical physicist, computer scientist, CPA and chief executive of public and international companies. He spent four years living aboard a cruising sailboat named Cadenza, and he has published articles on science, kayaking, archery, ham radio and blue-water sailing. His theme, in his words, is the intersection of humans with the underlying rules of the universe.
He founded Broken Symmetry Publishing in 2016. The name is a physics term. Pa’an came out alongside The Sage of Sagittarius and the novelette Radio.
Keep reading
Clearwater ghostwriter: the critique group I founded in Clearwater, and the writers who sat around that first table.
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