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Octolution 2027
A young man and a mature woman. A romantic, suspenseful, warm, and philosophical story about a radical animal-rights attack that changes everything.
When animals bred for slaughter begin to speak and demand their rights, the Octolution begins: a bloodless revolution after which nothing will ever be quite the same again. The events of the book begin at the small University of Millstone in Arkansas, United States, but quickly branch out across the world: Brazil, Spain, France, China, Australia, Denmark, Sweden…
Behind the attack lies a strange biological discovery known only as the octos—and an organism capable of changing animals in ways no one fully understands anymore.
As rumors spread, corporations panic, governments tighten control, and isolated incidents around the world begin hinting that something impossible may already be underway.
The second and concluding volume of the two-part work, Sunrise City, takes place entirely in Australia, where a herd of cattle escaped from a farm learns to speak and encounters human society in all its good and evil. At the center of the Australian events is a group of Aboriginal women led by the world-famous biologist Lowanna Wirrapunda, who feels more at home in the desert than in the halls of academia..
Octolution series is a dark speculative thriller about ecological crisis, radicalization, political power, and the dangerous moment when the voiceless finally begin to speak.
The book may be read as a work of speculative fiction, and as such it is suspenseful and entertaining. Yet it also addresses many serious questions, among them the significance of language as a carrier of culture and as a precondition for thought. Thinking is possible, to a surprisingly large extent, even without inner speech; but the emergence of culture and civilization requires the naming of things, because without names it is not possible to share thoughts with others with sufficient precision.
Sunrise City
In Australia, the animals have begun to speak — and nothing in the human world remains untouched.
Around Sunrise City, cattle and sheep form their own communities, adopt strange customs, argue over faith, leadership, freedom, and obedience, and begin to disturb every system that once defined them as property. Some humans see a miracle. Others see a threat. Churches split over whether animals have souls. Politicians search for votes among herds. Protesters demand that the government bring the animals under control.
At the center of the storm stand Lowanna, an Aboriginal scientist trying to understand the impossible, and Homer and Beethoven, two bulls learning what it means to lead. As language spreads, it does not bring peace. It brings memory, ambition, religion, rebellion — and the dangerous knowledge that animals may no longer accept the place humans have given them.
Both satirical and mythic, the second part of Octolution follows the birth of a new consciousness in a world unprepared to hear it speak. Thematically, the book follows in the footsteps of George Orwell, but with a somewhat more hopeful underlying tone.
Why Octolution?
If you look at the matter without the filtering spectacles of habit, the fate of farmed animals in the industrial food system is a holocaust repeated generation after generation: a bleak and brief life followed by another bleak and brief life, and another.
When human beings lived in the raw conditions of nature, poor devils among other poor devils, struggling daily for their own existence, there was no room for ethical reflection on the nature and rights of animals. Eat, or be eaten. That was the first law of existence. There is no morality in nature.
But those times are long behind us. Humanity has stepped onto a plane where we are guided not only by natural necessity, but also by a sense of right and wrong, of justice and injustice. There is an ethical duty to ask even the most difficult questions. Questions, too, about what — or whom — we eat.
At the first level of awareness, we may ask: in what conditions are farmed animals kept, and is their life in accordance with their own nature and their own needs? At the second level, the question arises whether human beings have any ethical right at all to breed animals in order to kill and eat them.
Under closer scrutiny, the problem opens into a swarm of more detailed and more precise questions, making it complex both for the individual and for society: morally, economically, politically, religiously, and not least attitudinally — at the level of tastes, habits, and culture. Making changes in one’s own life is difficult; making them on the scale of society, culture, and the economic system is harder still.
It is said that truth does not burn, even in fire. That is not true. Truth is easy to forget or conceal, for against every single truth stands an infinite multitude of untruths. The same applies in the realm of ethics. Evil sprouts more luxuriantly than good. It masks its face in a thousand ways, and once felled, it rises again and again from the mire, nourished by misinterpretations, half-truths, and appetites. And of those, there is no shortage.
This is precisely what the Octolution series is about. In the first part of the series, Octolution 2027, the emphasis falls on the natural-scientific perspective; in the second part, Sunrise City, on the social and political one. The story is also a thriller. It tells of a group of animal-rights activists and their idea of carrying out the largest and quietest act of terrorism in history — after which the world will never be the same again.
The Hypnozone books are all available in digital form only, and only on Amazon. They can be read on a phone, a laptop, or a PC.
The laptop has been humanity’s best friend since the Stone Age. Even the cave dwellers took pleasure in reading on one: on even the longest trek, they could carry thousands of books with them. The books always remained immaculate, and never acquired, for instance, wine stains or greasy or bloody fingerprints.