Ragnarok Conspiracy

Blurb

As The Copyright Wars, started by a quantum-blockchain-heist, have ended with the creation of the dangerous Debrisphere, so has the age of communication, as has the age of both conventional and cryptocurrency.
In the post-war world where printing-base is the new currency, a young forensic scientist travels to the moon setting out to once and for all debunk moon landing hoax conspiracy theories. What he finds on the moon though, ends up uncovering a conspiracy that goes much deeper than anyone could have ever imagined.

Foreword

A number of years ago, while in the Republic of Benin for a family visit, I got the inspiration for and started writing my first short story. After finishing that story, I got ideas for a second and a third story and got the idea of writing a themed collection of short stories. I got active on Goodreads, found myself a brilliant cover artist and a good editor and started publishing. But then two things happened that made me change my plans. One repeating topic in the feedback I got on my short stories was that, apparently, I was trying to fit a novel size story and trilogy size world building into a novelette sized book. The second piece of feedback I got was that my characters lacked depth. My third story wasn't finished yet, so I started to try and take the feedback by heart and started expanding on my third story. But then the always supportive Goodreads group I was active in turned unfriendly. Due to personal health concerns that I won't go into, I tend to shun major stressors in my life, so I stopped writing altogether.
Then, years later, I found the amazing blockchain based blogging platform HIVE (formerly Steemit). Having little to blog about, I started posting my novelettes as series of posts, but then, the spirit of writing caught me again, and I ended up writing a flash-fiction style series of blog posts that would fit well as a stretched out prologue to my unfinished work on my third story. Each of the blog posts introduced one of the many characters in my story. As my blog posts on HIVE continued, the story continued to develop and the direct feedback on draft chapters helped greatly with me sticking to finishing the story this time. HIVE is an amazing platform for content, not only because of the amazing community but also because the stake based blockchain based platform actually allows you to make money from good content.

So when my story started to develop, I was able to put some money back into the platform and ran a number of feedback rounds with prizes that could be won by providing useful feedback. You could say that HIVE allowed me to crowdsource my editing. I hope the editing done this way has boosted the quality of my work enough. It is an experiment. So please let me know if you feel publishing this book this way was premature.

This book is all about blockchain. It could not have come about without the HIVE blockchain that powers the HIVE platform, and the foundation of the world building in this book hinges on a n event that should scare everyone involved in cryptocurrency. But remember when reading the story, it's just fiction. Don't go panic-selling your Bitcoin or Ethereum out of fear for a real quantum blockchain heist.

I hope this book, my first novel sized work, addresses the problems with density and characters that my earlier work suffered from. If it has, I would consider rewriting one of the other two stories as a novel. The two short stories Orussian Quarantine and Atheist Afterlife are bundled with the eBook version of this book as bonus material. Feel free to drop me a message and let me know if you would like me to pick up one or both of my earlier stories as a novel sized rewriting project. Today HIVE is my primary social platform where I am reachable as

@pibara.

Open World story

As you may notice in this book, most of the work went into world building. This is an Open World story. This means that if you would like to write your own speculative fiction that is set in the world created in this book, you are free to do so. You may however NOT use my characters, but the geopolitical, technological, climatological, etc, etc situation is fully Open World for you to use in your stories.

Movie rights

While I think turning this book into a movie would be quite a challenge due to structure and timespan, I would still like to share something about movie rights to this story in case anyone is interested.