A note to my reader:
I self-published Closer Oceans and my resources didn’t extend to a good editor. Here is the improved blurb, errors, and the correct page attributions.
I sincerely hope you enjoy it.
Jacob Hamilton
Blurb
One needs to be an outsider to know how and when to escape.
Closer Oceans is the story of pursued young men escaping from a society of ennui to a militarised academy that is eight miles below the ocean’s surface and built within a dome. Fulfilling work and honest living are its promises away from the automation and bureaucracy above, with literature being its most valued resource; mixed with a potion called ichor, books can become weapons and survival tools when chewed.
The potential utopia is being distanced though: centuries of scoundrels have rigged its structure in order to coerce the labouring and keep the best lands and organic foods for themselves. A new scheme rumours to consolidate their corruption even further. Made outcasts on arrival and unwilling to conform, the young men search for how to liberate the Dome.
The optimism of youth keeping its head up is the force majeure against oldness’ bequeathed doom; Closer Oceans answers youth’s call for help when the heaviest decrepitude is all around it. Solutions to artificial intelligence, governance, the search for freedom, persecution and the individual human condition are all found within its voyage.
Errors
Page 7 – error about age – for deletion: ‘I have aged, I have aged eight years since then’
Page 11 – ‘slide’ to ‘slid’
Page 19 – ‘even’ to ‘event’
Page 20 – ‘Head’ to ‘head’
Page 32 – ‘made the man’ to ‘had made the man’
Page 52 – ‘out goggles’ to ‘our goggles’
Page 84 – ‘airdropped’ to ‘airdropping’
Page 108 – ‘had came’ to ‘had come’
Page 114 – capitalize ‘Where’ in ‘“Where are we going?”’
Page 117 – ‘above creatures’ to ‘above creature’
Page 118 – ‘discomposed’ to ‘decomposed’
Page 118 – ‘whose bones,’ (comma)
Page 123 – ‘then others’ to ‘then there are others’
Page 132 – ‘at on its exterior’ to ‘on its exterior’
Page 140 – ‘pro-cess’ to ‘process’
Page 140 – ‘contemporar-ies’ to ‘contemporaries’
Page 140 – ‘harrow-ing’ to ‘harrowing’
Page 160 – ‘co’ to ‘the dome’
*Attribution page number corrections:
Page 39 – The quote of Arthur Rimbaud, from A Season in Hell: Goodbye.
Page 51 – The quote of Mr. West, with thanks to Kanye West’s ‘Heard em say’ as inspiration.
Page 54 – “The Coral Bed Reefs Are Decadent And Depraved’ with thanks to Hunter S. Thompson.
Page 98 – Hus, as Hus from Tha Connection, in lyrics quoted and combined from their albums ‘Trapeze’ and ‘Moonwater’.
Page 100 – The quote from Hus, inspired by and my thanks given to Bill Hicks, a truth bringer now at rest.
Page 100 – Pablo Neruda’s quote: “only with burning patience shall we conquer the splendid city that will give light, justice and dignity to all men.”
Page 116 – The quote from The Kindness of Strangers by Kate Adie, page 257.
Page 120 – The quote from The Call of Cthulu by H. P. Lovecraft, page 251.
Page 140 – The quote from All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, page 186.
Page 144 – The quote from Robert Jordan in For Whom The Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemmingway, page 467.
Page 183 – The quote from The Whisperer in Darkness by H. P. Lovecraft.
Page 190 – The quote from Nick Drake, From the Morning.