As a father of four, a person with a more than full-time job, and some one who writes for several sites and for my own enjoyment I occasionally view sleep as a necessary evil. In Mark R. Brand's new book Life After Sleep, we find a world that has perfected sleep to the point where the average person only needs an hour to three hours per night to feel well-rested. In fact, in this world "real-sleep" in not recommended by physicians. You think at first that this would be tremendous, but as your follow the four characters through their daily routines you find this "Sleep" is not all that great of a solution.
Each character Max (a new father and vicious data storage technician), Jeremy, (a vet plagued with flashbacks and nightmare that are amplified by Sleep), Dr. Frost (a doctor that isn't sustained by Sleep), and Lila (a promoter that lives a wild, but mostly virtual life) use Sleep is a different way, and each find it plays a bigger role than it should. I suppose the more you reduce it and push it out of your life the more important it becomes.
My favorite element of the collection are the bits of future technology that Brand pulls in. First, the world is functioning in petabytes and not gigabytes, but the coolest thing is the concept of dunking. This is a technology that allows you to virtually be anywhere in the world and interact with what is currently going on there. I don't know what year this is set in, but I can't wait for that advancement. However, that is just one of the many tech related ideas Brand packs into this novel.
In Life After Sleep, Brand blends fantasy with real life situations and conveys how different characters react. It is a fascinating look at how important sleep is to how we function and how our days may look if we made a few enhancements to the process. The book is available in EPUB, PDF and MOBI/Kindle editions through the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography.
Filed under: chicago novels
Tags: CCLaP, Mark Brand
