Shredded – A Dystopian Novel

Shredded
279 Pages
ISBN 978-1537215686

Who can erase my existence from the mind of God?

Grace, a civil servant with a sordid past, wakes one morning to find that she’s become a viral sensation: Her life has been hacked, woven into a lifestream, a full-immersion, 3-D, virtual reality experience that thrill-seeking stream riders can inhabit for a few dollars. The helplessness she feels, knowing she’s powerless to keep strangers from getting their jollies reliving her life, and her fear that her teenage son, Dylan, might stumble upon her explicit lifestream, lead her to find a shredder, an expert in the ways of the Worldstream, the nearly infinitely detailed record of data from the ubiquitous Internet of Things. He’ll erase her lifestream and all of her data, accumulated since the day she was born. Her life will be hers again, but she’ll be outside of the Worldstream—and she can never go back.

"This fast-paced novel is defined by powerful characters, but even more so by eye-opening ideas. There are enough parallels between O’Donnell’s fantastical vision of the future and the present day to send a shiver up readers’ spines. Driving these types of issues into the public eye, in the confines of an unpredictable and well-crafted plot, makes this book stand out, and ensure that it is hard to forget." Self-Publishing Review, ★★★★★

Charles O'Donnell

About Charles O'Donnell (Columbus, Ohio Author)

Charles O'Donnell

Charles O’Donnell writes thrillers with high-tech themes in international and futuristic settings. He recently retired from a career of thirty-five years in engineering and manufacturing to write full-time, leveraging his decades of writing experience, mostly email, but, as Charles points out, “that counts.”

His latest project, Shredded, is the product of his fascination with the progress of technology to either augment reality or to replace it entirely, and his concern over the erosion of privacy in a world in which everything is shared online, and nobody reads the terms and conditions.

Charles lives with his wife, Helen, life partner and fellow paranoid in Westerville, Ohio.