Back Jacket Hack-Job #7: Artificial Absolutes

A post by Mary Fan

My turn to do a Back Jacket Hack-Job! For those of you just tuning in, this is our monthly segment in
which we purposely write atrocious back cover copy for books. Picking a book was harder than I thought! Since the new Star Wars movie is coming out at the end of the week (yes, I already have my tickets, and yes, they're for the midnight show, and yes, I was one of the crazies who bought them right when they went on sale), I thought about doing one of the Star Wars Expanded Universe novels. But mocking them felt like sacrilege, especially since they've all been blown away from the canon, just as Alderaan was blown away. Sad times...

Anyway, there's only one space-related book I knew I wouldn't offend anyone by mocking, and that is my own, ARTIFICIAL ABSOLUTES. So here goes...

Jane is bored. Bored, bored, bored. She's stuck in a boring office job, where she has to deal with boring office tasks. She barely talks to her boring older brother. Not because she doesn't like him or anything, but because they're both so boring, they have nothing to talk about. And she's dating a boring seminary student. Well, that last part isn't a bad thing. She actually kind of likes Adam. Even though he spends all day talking about boring philosophical stuff, like "Do AIs count as people?" Anyway, you'd think living in a far-future space opera world, with Star Wars-y spaceships and Matrix-y virtual reality, would be exciting, but Jane doesn't get to do any of the fun stuff.

And then everything goes to hell.

Her boyfriend gets his ass kidnapped and her brother gets his ass framed for murder all within twenty-four topsy-turvy hours. So it's up to Jane to save both their asses. Except she has no idea how to do any of the badass stuff usually required for ass-saving. Her aim sucks, her piloting skills are eh, and her idea of a strategy is "screw it, let's just go!" Things only get worse when she stumbles into a bigger conspiracy that requires that she and her brother save the entire galaxy's collective ass.

Well, at least she's not bored anymore.