If I could have written only one book in my life, it would have been Skol. Yet the first version of the book, published in 2015, did not sell at all.
Yes, this story of the future of shy people, told through one shy young man’s odyssey across three centuries, remained the most unread of my stories, even though it is the best of them.
Because of that, I decided recently to give this curious orphan of mine a little more attention. I made a couple of changes to the ending that are significant enough that I’m re-publishing it now with a new ISBN and a new cover, though with the same title.
Conceived in 1985 during a week hiking alone in the forests of Ontario’s Algonquin Park, Skol was in the works for a long time.
Shy 17 year-old Simon grew up on a space-freighter with only his father and one brother, and was never allowed to land on a planet. But he gets chosen to attend a school on wild, almost uninhabited Earth, the beginning of his long journey.
When Simon started out back in 1985, he didn’t have his pet rat Jerry with him, and I didn’t know yet about the few humanoid robots who are the only remaining inhabitants of deserted New York City. I had no idea back then that a little robot teddy-bear, dusty and dormant on the floor of a Brooklyn house for 200 years, would become crucial to the story, and I had no idea how Simon might resolve his longing to experience love with a woman.
But it’s all there now, and you can read about it. Here are six free PDF chapters of this new 2019 version:
SKOL 2019 – 6 free chapts – mobile
SKOL 2019 – 6 free chapts – for PC
You can buy the book on any Amazon website. It is currently only $1.99 in the USA, and a comparable price elsewhere. Here it is at Amazon.com:
Alan Conrad 