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"South Carolina author Ken Jasper showcases the technical mastery of Clancy (Without Remorse), the dark imagination of Harris (Silence of the Lambs), and the breathless pace of Grisham (The Firm). If you're a fan of the contemporary American thriller, this is a ride you won't want to miss."
"The reader is caught in the story's grip, like a movie that you watch without averting your eyes for a second!"
"I tried to predict where it was going, but [it] always outfoxed me."
"After the first chapter I was hooked and put aside my other reading."
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Voices of Babylon is a fast-paced techno-thriller about genes and genius, about the mixed blessings of scientific progress, and, of course, about the eternal battle between good and evil.
Welcome to the mad, man world of Edward P. Roundhouse, a quiet genius, a biochemistry wizard, with a sixth sense of the human mind. To his friends, he was a brilliant joker. To his professors, he was the messiah--a portal into a world free of disease and infirmity. And yet when he died, 25 years ago, an unknowing world barely breathed a sigh at its loss.
But now the evidence of his genius is everywhere--from the potent street hallucinogen KC, and the mysterious sterility epidemic in Africa, to the East German Stasi's ghastly myth-killing drug Babylon. Governments, police, and intelligence agencies are frantically searching for him and most don't even know it.
What they also don't know is that the world is on the verge of a genetic calamity that could forever alter the human race. That only Detective Cameron Gilly knows, and he must find a way to stop it.
In paperback from Booklocker and ebook from Download Press.
If the title Voices of Babylon conjures up Biblical images of cities of sin, armies of murdering marauders, towers of mud brick and twigs, cities of splendorous hanging gardens and whatnot, well, you're a good three thousand years off the mark. Voices is none of that.
Nor is the story futuristic science fiction, as in "Babylon 5" et al. Set in current times, Voices of Babylon is a tale of thoroughly modern evil.
And don't let yourself be spooked by the "techno-thriller" genre. You won't be needing your old high school chemistry textbook to realize how close humanity is coming to disaster.
Conceived in 1998, the original story revolved around Flashback, a fictional drug that allowed its user to relive brief periods of his life—not in a blurry, dreamlike fashion, but exactly as they occurred when they occurred. The idea that the human mind retains everything it has ever sensed comes straight from the writings of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. In his book Dianetics, Hubbard describes the concept of a mental and spiritual clear state, in which all blocking "engrams" have been erased and one has access to his entire life's memory. An enticing idea, certainly, for what mortal doesn't have at least a few glorious memorable moments crying out for replay?
But if Flashback were to exist at all, it was going to take more than your average Galaxo-Welcome lab grunt to whip it up. Clearly, its creator was going to have to be a spooky sort of genius. Enter Edward Roundhouse, a biochemistry prodigy, who as a graduate student had once worked for the CIA's super-secret MK-ULTRA project to develop assassination drugs and truth serums. (Think MK-ULTRA is science fiction? Not so! We refer you to
the exotic vaults of Erowid in our Links page.)
Once Roundhouse had arrived, it was only a matter of time before his fertile and amoral mind would dream up a host of other drugs: the powerful hallucinogen KC, the memory enhancing Clear Light, the sterility toxin China Syndrome, and the myth-killing Babylon. While all are fictional, there is nothing implausible about any of these sinister concoctions. They are born of modern science.
The idea for the drug
Babylon
was taken from a true-life espionage story. In 1978, a Bulgarian defector named Georgi Markov was poked with the tip of an umbrella by a Soviet agent while waiting at a
London
bus stop. He died four days later. His autopsy revealed he had been injected with a tiny pellet containing a few hundred millionths of a gram of the super deadly toxin ricin. Taken together with the CIA's MK-ULTRA project, the possibility of one or another country coming up with a drug like
Babylon
seems hardly far fetched.
China Syndrome grew out of the real-life efforts of the People's Republic to stem its national birthrate. If a government could force abortion on unwilling parents, force sterilization on repeat offenders, what was to stop it from surreptitiously sterilizing large portions of the population?
That a racist madman might then employ the same technology in service to his delusions was an obvious outgrowth of that tortured morality. However, the idea for Carson Breaux's mission to exterminate "the black race" was actually derived from a paranoid mythology at the fringe of the American urban culture itself. There is a sincere belief among some that AIDS and crack cocaine were developed by the CIA with the specific intention of wiping out the black race. Given the CIA's dubious record of achievements over its short history, this seems unlikely.
But is it possible? With the mapping of the human genome—an achievement that promises huge benefits in medicine—we have opened a real-life Pandora's Box. As with the cracking of the atom, there is no way we can put it back. For good or ill, drugs will soon be routinely and precisely keyed to one's DNA. It remains to be seen whether that will be a blessing or a damnation, but if history is any indication, it will be a lot of both.
Want to sample a few chapters? It's FREEEE! Click here to download. (Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader. Chances are you've already got it, but if not, click here to get it. It's free, too!)
