Thursday 16 June 2016

Setting the Scene with Laura Lam

On the blog today, I'm pleased to welcome Laura Lam who want to tell us about the setting for her adult fiction debut, False Hearts.
False Hearts is set in a near-future San Francisco. I grew up about half an hour outside of the city, but now I live almost six thousand miles away in Scotland. I had loads of fun taking my home stomping grounds and twisting it into my vision of the future. 

San Francisco in the future at first glance seems like a utopia. Everything is recycled, pollution is almost disappeared, and crime and poverty as also anachronistic things left in the past. Yet crime has a way of springing up between the cracks. 
A big influence was this History Channel City of the Future winner for San Francisco. The site describes it as “a full-scale urban system that combines the most innovative green technologies with San Francisco’s unique microclimate and geologic conditions, to produce a compelling vision for the future. Hydro-Net, as the project is known, will bring the lovely city-by-the-bay (which many Inhabitants call home) squarely into the 22nd Century with algae-harvesting towers, geothermal energy ‘mushrooms’, and fog catchers which distill fresh water from San Francisco’s infamous fog.”
Published by Macmillan in June 2016
Summary
Orphan Black meets Inception: Two formerly conjoined sisters are ensnared in a murderous plot involving psychoactive drugs, shared dreaming, organized crime, and a sinister cult. 
Raised in the closed cult of Mana’s Hearth and denied access to modern technology, conjoined sisters Taema and Tila dream of a life beyond the walls of the compound. When the heart they share begins to fail, the twins escape to San Francisco, where they are surgically separated and given new artificial hearts. From then on they pursue lives beyond anything they could have previously imagined.
Ten years later, Tila returns one night to the twins’ home in the city, terrified and covered in blood, just before the police arrive and arrest her for murder—the first homicide by a civilian in decades. Tila is suspected of involvement with the Ratel, a powerful crime syndicate that deals in the flow of Zeal, a drug that allows violent minds to enact their darkest desires in a terrifying dreamscape. Taema is given a proposition: go undercover as her sister and perhaps save her twin’s life. But during her investigation Taema discovers disturbing links between the twins’ past and their present. Once unable to keep anything from each other, the sisters now discover the true cost of secrets.

To find out more about Laura Lam:

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