Imagine you’re a millionaire computer genius before you’ve even made it to college and then throw in an impending apocalypse in the mix and you’ve got yourself The Black Disc, the new sci-fi novel from newcomer, David Ramirez. Following up on his very recent 2015 debut, the US author and former molecular biologist is turning his attention to the prophesied great doom in the sky, but there’s still a lot of room for what’s looking like a keen interest in hacking.
The hardback release is scheduled for a publication date on the 24th March 2016, so there’s plenty of time to catch up on his one book back-catalogue in advance of The Black Disc hitting the book shelves. While the reviews of his last publication, The Forever Watch, aren’t always particularly flattering, Ramirez is still one of the newest additions to the sci-fi genre and if his second novel can improve upon the solid storyline foundations of his debut, stripping out the negatives along the way, then it could be one to look out for.
The story focuses on seventeen year-old Susan King, who to all intents and purposes is a normal girl on the verge of completing her SATs, but she’s got a few big skeletons in the closet that make her much less of the norm for kids her age. Firstly, she’s got hacking mad skills, which she uses to the benefit of the activist causes that she supports, and secondly, she’s also managed to amass a small fortune thanks to her online activities, so paying her way through college probably won’t be that much of a challenge.
However, her average and above average life gets hit with a crazy curve ball when she gets sent a twisted chain email predicting the end of the world, a message that has also been sent to millions of other people throughout the world. While it’s easily ignored to begin with, the presence of a black disc in orbit around the world isn’t, and it all becomes dangerously serious when the predictions start to come true, leaving Susan, and the rest of humanity, with a pretty big issue of human survival to deal with.
It’s a fairly significant departure from the story of The Forever Watch, which was set on a human scape ship that is making a 1,000 year journey to find a new home for humanity, but a lot of the same themes are back again in Ramirez’s second stand-alone novel. Hacking is a big feature, but so is social activism, the ability of just one person to have a huge impact on the course of humanity and a perilous predicament of potential extinction looming large on the horizon.
There’s also a certain feminist outlook to the author’s determination to feature young, talented and determined women at the centre of his books, making it another inspirational outing for smart girls looking for a confidence boost everywhere. Add to that the fact that Susan is good at the very things that have become stereotypically portrayed as being led by men – science, maths, technology, computing, hacking, but business – and you’ve got a unique stand point to look at.
The science and tech side of the story behind The Black Disc is pretty easy to understand with David Ramirez’s background in computing, molecular biology and his work on the human genome project. It should mean that the science side of the upcoming sci-fi adventure is grounded in a good chunk of reality, which isn’t always the case in other books in the genre that can get a bit too ungrounded at times.
