Max Bantleman

Souldice Max Bantleman

SoulDice is a satirical comedy sci-fi adventure. It weaves together the core characters in a travelling tale of discovery through a strange and wondrous Universe. SoulDice features 'data-dumps', pieces of writing extracted from a plethora of Galactic tomes and news-feeds, to illustrate the normality of weirdness. If you like HGTTG, Pratchett, Red Dwarf, Gaiman, Coifer - you'll probably like this. If you don't - you should probably buy this book and give it so someone who does. The Main Characters: Harper, a despondent spaceship Captain and Arlia, the AI she creates to give her life purpose. Jesus and his Imp tormentor. Miles and Penny: two escapees from a self-destructing Earth. Spike and Jools: two Galactic Troopers who want out of their life of violence. These are our unlikely intrepid heroes. Their lives become intertwined as they come under the influence of QFish, a god-like sentience intent on understanding the best way to destroy everything in existence. Their adventures are interspersed with 'data-dumps', drawn from a multitude of sources from throughout the Galaxy. The data-dumps illustrate how diverse the universe is in relation to what our galactic-travelling heroes may think of as strange as they try to make some sense of their bizarre encounters. On their travels, as well as bumping in to each other, they encounter (among many other things): the Galactic Council's terrorist enemy, the 'Bidens', a debauched luxury-resort world, a whole system built to be farmed by QFish for sentience, the frustration of being stuck in lapsed-space, a hyper-real virtual world that offers them immortality and the ghostly voice of Jim Morrison. They are challenged to remain sane, to answer some of the questions that assault us all and to seek out what each of them thinks they should really be doing. Some of which they manage to do