Book Information Title: Consequence
Author: Steve Masover
Publisher: Salted Rose
Release Date: September 29, 2015
ISBN 978-0-9864263-0-8 | Trade paperback, 344 pages, 5.25” x 8”, $15.00 ISBN 978-0-9864263-1-5 | EPUB / Nook $7.99 ISBN 978-0-9864263-2-2 | Kindle $7.99
San Francisco activist Christopher Kalman has little to show for years spent organizing nonviolent marches, speak-outs, blockades, and shutdowns for social and environmental justice. When a shadowy eco-saboteur proposes an attack on genetically engineered agriculture, Christopher is ripe to be drawn into a more dangerous game. His certainty that humankind stands on the brink of ecological ruin drives Christopher to reckless acts and rash alliances, pitting grave personal risk against conscientious passion.
Consequence is set in 2004 against the first anniversary of the Iraq War, as an international biotechnology convention is slated to convene at San Francisco’s Moscone Center. Activists up and down the west coast are raising alarms about danger posed by genetic engineering to the health and future of humankind’s only biosphere.
Christopher, whose political collective helped stage the Bay Area’s part in massive, worldwide antiwar protests a year before, is tormented by a global movement’s failure to stop the invasion of Iraq. It is at this intersection of despair and distress that Christopher is drawn into a world of clandestine radicalism, confronting a choice between the seeming impotence of non-violence and the precarious morality of direct attack on a toxic industry.
In Consequence, debut novelist Steve Masover grapples with what it means to act ethically in a society on the brink of ruin. Driven to act consequentially when the usual tactics of protest fall short, Christopher and his household reap the whirlwind.
Consequence is being published as social divisions yawn, government comes under increasingly corporate control, fossil fuel based economies face looming disruption, and a monoculture oriented food infrastructure razes the soil, water, and symbiosis on which it depends. From 400,000 climate activists streaming down Sixth Avenue in New York last September, to Black Lives Matter protests erupting across the U.S., to a worldwide March Against Monsanto in May 2015, people are agitating for change. In a world that reads like any twenty-first century newspaper, Masover paints a nuanced portrait of rational, compassionate activists whose desperation drives them to betray sincerely held principle.
About the Author
Steve Masover is an author, activist, and information technologist. A native of Chicago, his family relocated to the Bay Area in 1970. Masover currently lives and works in Berkeley, California. Consequence is his first novel. Masover’s short fiction has appeared in Five Fingers Review and Christopher Street. An essay length memoir piece is anthologized in Our Mothers' Spirits (HarperCollins, 1997).
Masover coauthored the screenplay of the anti-apartheid movement documentary Soweto to Berkeley (Cinema Guild, 1988). He blogs at One Finger Typing and on Daily Kos. Kicking off a lifetime of activism in the fifth grade, Steve wore a black armband for the Vietnam War Moratorium of 1969. He organized on the UC Berkeley campus in the movement against South African apartheid during the mid-1980s; participated in the first successful blockade of the Golden Gate Bridge in 1989 to protest inadequate response to the AIDS epidemic; and helped stage guerilla theater across the Bay Area in opposition to government-administered torture from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo.
Currently he is active in the Bay Area around climate change issues, with a focus on the fossil fuel divestment movement on the UC Berkeley campus. From opposing reckless wars, to realizing queer liberation, to decrying the pacifying tyranny of television, Steve has spoken out in the media, choked on the tear gas, and kissed-in at the suburban malls. Book Information Title: Consequence Author: Steve Masover Publisher: Salted Rose Press
No comments:
Post a Comment