“Soulcage” Novella Synopsis

Time to formally announce this new project: Soulcage, my science fiction novella. I’m planning to release it sometime early next year.

Below, you can find the synopsis. I’m very much looking forward to being ready to release this. It stands, and likely will continue to stand, as the most personal work of fiction I will ever write. It is not a literal self-insert, but it deals with experiences that I don’t think many people have written about.

Side note: I’m only about 50% done with the first draft of Soulcage, so I don’t actually know for sure if it will be under 50,000 words and thus qualify as a novella rather than a full novel. But that would be my preferred outcome. It will only break 50,000 words if the story quality requires it (and then I will concede it as an “accidental novel”).

Here is the synopsis:

“The Soulcage made you immortal, in a sense. With it, you could go and do a thousand things ordinary people could never do in their entire lifetimes. Go places you would never otherwise go and talk to people you would never meet. But whatever you did, it would never be your own life. Everything, good or bad, was felt only through a thick layer of separation, an inescapable barrier to the tangible, the authentic. In the Soulcage, experiencing life—real life—was impossible.”

Prisoner of war Montgomery Noa awakens beside the Soulcage: a machine that encloses him and transports his mind into another body to do the bidding of his masters—a body that is usually robotic, often expendable, and all-too-frequently intended to demean. His consciousness is returned to his imprisoned body to repeat it all day after day. His captors see to it that he suffers as much as possible. He dies. He hurts. He lives every life but his own.

And he cannot help but wonder if he will even be the same person if and when he escapes.