Terra Incognita

international | arts and media | press release Saturday August 18, 2007 01:27 by Gary Hicks gary at gary-hicks dot com

Drawn together apparently by the hand of fate, Trent and Cole escape the oppressive totalitarian domed city that has nurtured them all their lives.

Outside they discover a world they could never have imagined. They are pursued by the city Militia, intent on returning them to the secretive entity that oversees every facet of the city.

They are joined by Floyd, who turns against the Militia; only to be captured once more and freed by those they would have considered most unlikely to help them.

The trio begin to understand the truth of their world and must decide for whom they will fight in the coming wars...

Terra Incognita Cover art - "schiziod" by kind permission of Peter Sharpe (www.petersharpe.com)

I have experienced the on-going, ever growing, burning desire to write fiction; specifically science fiction. To that end, I finally sat down and started writing in earnest a couple of years ago. Full of the joys and wonder at having created something as large as a novel, I wasted no time and began the arduous process of submitting sample chapters to literary agents and at the same time began writing the sequel.

The first novel has, as yet, not found a home with an agent; but I have pressed on and now have four novels in an intended series of ten written. At the beginning of this year, I came across an American site that hosts audio books by predominantly unpublished authors.

This, I thought sounded like an amazing idea and I corralled a number of friends in front of microphones and recorded the results of them voices the words I had written. I then took these recordings and mixed them together with a variety of sound effects and music to create the beginnings of a thirty-six episode series.

The first ten episodes are available for free, along with 143 (at the time of writing) other podcast, serialized novels at http://www.podiobooks.com The audio books cover a fairly wide range of genres and topics and are all free being released under a Creative Commons License. The basis for Podiobooks.com is as a Podcast service especially designed for audio books.

My web site has more information about the cast, more thumb nail sketches in their own words, as well as a brief synopsis for the first four novels and a number of links to sites from which Terra Incognita may be downloaded or subscribed to.

My book, as with other Podiobooks, is completely free. Each episode is released under a Creative Commons Non-Commercial License and may be downloaded, listened to, and distributed providing that no alteration, amendments or editing of the audio files is undertaken.

Cheers,

Gary Hicks