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LATEST PR NEWS: Was A Time When has received an Honorable Mention award in five of five 2012 Book Festivals, proving it to be a literary success. Penny says, "It would have been nice to win First Place, but professional recognition is important, too." He admits, "My story hits too close to the truth to be a financial success".
Sam Penny is the author of a new novel entitled
Was a Time When. On December
27, 2011, the book was uploaded
and published as a Kindle book and can be purchased at Amazon for immediate
download. Its cost is $3.98.
The hardcopy print
version was approved January 20, 2012, and is available for
immediate shipment from Create Space at a cost of $14.98.
Email sam@WasATimeWhen.com
if you wish to review, comment and contribute to the buzz about this book.
Tell me of your forum and audience. A limited number of free copies of the
hardcopy book or a download of a .PDF or .PRC file are available to
qualified reviewers.
About Was a Time
When
This 244 page science fiction novel tells of a
possible fate of the world in the next 85 years during the Great Collapse
of the human civilization. Some say it will never happen. Others say
it cannot happen that fast. A few say it is inevitable.
For reference, I have chosen
November 20,
2011 to be the start of Was a Time
When. I know what happened
before that time; I am not sure what happens after that time. As time
passes we will all know more.
The natural disasters I describe are
expected to occur in the coming years and their
timing is left to Nature for adjudication, but what
is done NOW by humanity determines whether or not
many of the societal changes I describe in the book
happen in the future or not.
This
writing of
this tale actually began in 2006 as an exercise
for the National Novel Writing
Month. I decided I could write a novel in 30 days. I
chose to write the autobiography of my fictional great-grandson, Sam,
yet-to-be-born in 2015. I did in fact write about a third of the book in
the first thiry days. It took much
longer to
finish, but at least I set the tone
and direction of the story.
My great-grandson Sam
will live through the greatest cultural transition
ever experienced by the human race. I encased his memoirs in a short
story telling of an expedition of Neu-human archeologists from a thousand
years in the future, 3100 A.D., who return to the Pacific Coast searching
for their roots. They would find Sam's recorded life story and hear a
first-hand account of the “Great Collapse” of human society as they had
come to call it.
As the story
matured it
became necessary to divorce the familial relationship
between Sam and me. I remained
as the author, and a new character named
Sam Hardy took over as the main character.
Sam
Hardy's life begins at the peak of the tremendous
spurt of technology and social advance in the second
decade of the 21st century, powered by what many
still thought at the time would be an infinite supply
of energy and a stable world of commerce and trade.
Sam writes the history of humanity's course
through the transitions that result from expected
natural disasters, resource depletion, climate
change, over-population, and economic and cultural
failure as his family and tribe struggle to learn to
live in a new world of limited resources and crashing
dreams.
There are many possible worlds
our progeny could face, but in my mind the world described here
unfortunately seems to
be one of the more probable. My goal is
to tell of some of the changes that can
be expected as our society searches for its future, and as those
technologies and resources on which our civilization depend fall away. Only
by looking at our possible futures can we find
a way to survive the troubles that
face our society.
This is a tale of retrospection, as seen through the
eyes of someone who lives through it and remembers
that there Was a Time When
things were so different. And yet, in Sam's
final words, there is still hope:
“So this is goodbye. Maybe I
have been wrong in my pessimism and damnation of humanity, and there
really is a future for mankind on this planet. At least I have joined a
group that is beginning the steps to future recovery. God willing, I will
have the chance to watch that future blossom. I pray this band I join will
build the roots of a better civilization than what my peers built for
the last one.”
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