Would you sacrifice your humanity to live free from pain and suffering?
Conservationist Anja Lapin always stood firm against her father’s profiteering. But in her wildest dreams, she never guessed his tech company would stumble on an algorithm enabling humans to digitize their bodies and secure artificial immortality.
Before Anja can stage a protest, terrorists take out the research team, along with her father. Billions adopt the new technology in record time, lured by an eternity free from pain and filled with pleasure—even if it means losing a few pieces of their identity.
Anja finds she’s one of the last two flesh and blood humans remaining on Earth. But while her worries turn to the future of consciousness, her father’s rival plots to hijack the network of digitized people and claim ultimate control.
Can Anja counter the attack and safeguard a brave new stage of human evolution?
Zero Percenters is a metaphysical science fiction novel. If you like exploring futuristic possibilities, artificial intelligence, and the meaning of life, then you’ll love Scott T. Grusky’s intriguing adventure.
Read Zero Percenters to witness the future of consciousness today!
Readers will get the most from approaching this story as a parable of how the physical realm can inhibit the quest for enlightenment, rather than as a science fiction novel about the social ramifications of technological advances. Grusky doesn’t explore the challenging ethical edge cases of digitization, examine why AIs are content to be servants, or describe how religious objections or international conflicts were overcome in five weeks. Instead, he crafts a fanciful vision of human society without physical needs or limitations: no money, no pollution, no borders, frequent self-reinvention, universal participation in hours-long chanting circles, spiritual and psychological freedom.
Characterization is scant; Anja, Vicia, and other characters primarily exist to generate musings about consciousness and explicate this posthuman utopia. The story is leisurely, with many scenes taking place in peaceful natural settings and exploring metaphysical concepts. “Only consciousness was real,” Anja thinks as she meditates on a mountaintop. This is the ultimate fantasy for those who cherish the hope of no-cost universal interconnectedness and peace.
Takeaway: Transcendence-seekers will sink blissfully into this fable of how technological liberation from the flesh might lead to mass enlightenment.
Great for fans of Richard Bach, Herman Hesse.
Production grades
Cover: C
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: -
Editing: B
Marketing copy: -
A bright, excellently thought out, page-turning tale. Humanity’s never ending struggle towards balance is explored with a contemporary computer-age twist in Scott T. Grusky’s fine science fiction novel, Zero Percenters.
This book was wonderfully written… an excellent read for fans of realistic science fiction.
This is a book for today’s society… Grusky has given the world much to think about in terms of the future and what to possibly expect.
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Zero Percenters was selected by Amazing Stories for its list of “science fiction books to look for December 2019.”
The prestigious magazine said, “Grusky’s story goes beyond the usual imagining of virtual society by asking what the uploaded have lost and how conflict will emerge in the virtual.”
