The God Organ by Anthony J. Melchiorri #BookTour & Unique Giveaway

The God Organ by Anthony J. Melchiorri

The LyfeGen Sustain is an artificial organ designed to bestow recipients with virtual immortality.

Instead, its owners are dying.

In 2063 Chicago, a rapidly growing company, LyfeGen, drives a biotechnological revolution that enables people to live significantly longer lives, free of cancer, genetically inherited diseases, and even wrinkles. But these benefits are only available to those people with the money to afford these advanced technologies.

The prolonged lives of the moderately and extremely wealthy is upending the economy as job growth and opportunities stagnate, causing widespread unrest in the general populace. Threatening drastic action, extremist religious groups protest these unnatural artificial organs. Competing companies are desperate to take advantage of LyfeGen’s seemingly grim future as the chaos unfolds.

Caught in the midst of this turmoil, the inventor of the artificial organ, Preston Carter, worries that someone with no regard for human life has betrayed his company and is setting him up for failure. He is not alone in his fears.

Amid the confusion, backstabbing, and all-out assault on the biotech industry, a young bioengineer races to findthe fault in the artificial organ; an investigative journalist delves into a story that will alter her career; a destitute man struggles to make a living in the biotech world, as he turns to desperate measures; and an amateur hacker infiltrates LyfeGen as she roots out the secrets of their technology. With a Sustain organ implanted in his own body, Preston must weather the perilous storm, determined to save his company and the lives of all who once trusted LyfeGen—before he’s killed by his own invention.

Excerpt:

Monica Wolfe sat in the Corner Street Bakery, sipping on a chai tea latte. The scent of freshly baked muffins and bread floated around the bakery, mingling with the aroma of fresh-brewed coffee. While the clatter of dishes and dripping coffee sounded from behind the counter, the morning patrons came and went quietly. Most everyone entered bundled in coats, a smattering of neutral grays, browns, and blacks, dripping with the snow that melted off their clothes. Low- hanging mist clung to the windows and fogged up the air outside as passing cars whipped up blusters of snow in their drafts.

The warmth of the latte crept into her fingers as she held the cup, combating the icy feelings that had followed her in from the streets. When a chilling blast of air followed another patron into the store, she scrutinized the new face.

Again, it wasn’t him.

She was sure he would show up, as he did most every day. And, today, she would risk everything. She would steal everything from him; she would steal the secrets of the LyfeGen Sustain, the god organ.

 

Author Interview

 

Where does you inspiration come from?

While performing my research work, I often come across scientific journal articles or listen to seminars by professors, scientists, and other professionals that introduce me to cutting-edge technology, especially in the field of biomedicine. I love to think about how these concepts and inventions can find their way into a story. How might someone use them for nefarious purposes? How might someone profit by abusing this technology? What are the societal implications? That gives me a start for the overall plot idea and my characters start showing up as I imagine the world in which these new technologies exist.

 

Would you ever want to change genre’s and if so what would you like to experiment with?

I would love to write fantasy someday. The prospect of developing and creating my own world, new creatures, the possibility of magic, and the freedom that comes from constructing your own imaginative cultures and societies is both wonderful and daunting. I think I’d like to integrate a world where technology and magic exist together. It would be fun to take the world I’m somewhat familiar with (science) and throw it into a world that I’m completely lost in (fantasy).

 

Are your characters/ideas drawn from people that you know personally in any way?

Absolutely. The fun part is when my dad reads one of my books and says, “Hey, that’s your brother!” I don’t necessarily use a carbon-copy of people I know in my books, but I like to steal certain traits, habits, or characteristics to help make my characters more realistic. I’m paraphrasing Quentin Tarantino here, but I believe he once said something about how your writing should contain so much of yourself and the people you know that you would be embarrassed to show it to your friends and family because they would recognize you and others you know in your work. In certain cases, I have definitely achieved that embarrassment.

 

I grew up in Normal, Illinois. After a regular (it’s hard, but I refuse to make a pun of it) childhood in Normal, I left for the University of Iowa to get a degree in Biomedical Engineering. But, I couldn’t give up reading and writing and there really wasn’t enough of that in engineering (unless you’re into thick, no-thrills books on thermodynamics and polymer physics). I picked up a second degree in English while working on the Biomedical Engineering degree and have since counted myself fortunate for making that decision. Iowa City, North America’s only official UNESCO City of Literature, is a thriving hotbed of writers and readers, with some of the best visiting the city for their renowned workshop or famous authors dropping by to read a story they’ve written and chat. I had the opportunity to meet plenty of great writers and storytellers that inspired me to keep writing, even when I graduated and entered a doctoral program at the University of Maryland for Bioengineering.

Today, when I’m not writing and reading, I’m primarily working on tissue engineered blood vessels, gearing my work for children with congenital heart defects. I get to work with awesome 3D printing technologies and am always astounded by the rapidly advancing technologies coursing through the veins of universities and research settings. Much of my writing has been inspired by those advancements and my conversations with other researchers, scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and many others interested in our evolving world.

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