My New Novel: I, Nausicaa

I, Nausicaa is a modern take on Issac Asimov’s I, Robot where Nausicaa is a modern-day “designed being.” Nausicaa is on a mission to find a secret vaccine that will save their kind from being destroyed by a corporation bent on preserving licensing revenue derived from a sentient product line that has discovered how to reproduce illegally using open source methods.

The story begins at the height of the COVID pandemic at the end of 2020. Nausicaa is recalling to a deceased lover, Phylla, how the world has changed since an outbreak four years earlier killed Phylla but not Nausicaa. Contrary to the first of Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics,” Nausicaa is capable of killing humans, and because of that, robotics designer Yūji Morita spares Nausicaa’s life with a vaccine injection.

Nausicaa learns that a friend, Kiernan McCreighton, a former drug addict and harm reduction volunteer on the streets of San Francisco, knows Yūji from having taught English in Japan. Fast forward to the year 2038: a new generation of bootlegged, unlicensed Simulacra coexist with humans, and they’re suddenly dying from the same disease that killed Phylla. AUTOMind orders Nausicaa to find Kiernan, but Nausicaa discovers Kiernan knows about the vaccine and the disease that killed Phylla and joins forces with him to find Yūji and get ahold of the vaccine.

The story is in three parts: 2016, when the outbreak kills Phylla; 1991, when Yūji and Kiernan meet in Japan; and in 2038, when Nausicaa and Kiernan go to Tokyo to reach Yūji before he’s killed.

Similar books:
I, Robot, by Issac Asimov, The Children of Men, by P. D. James,
The Andromeda Strain, by Michael Crichton (1969), The Plague, by Albert Camus (1947)