Movies, Shows, & Books: BLOG TOUR: Anyone by Charles Soule

Welcome to the Official Blog Tour for Charles Soule's Anyone! Today, we celebrate this new release with an exclusive excerpt AND a cool author-hosted giveaway! So... Be sure to check it out and grab your copy now!!! Follow the tour, HERE!

Genre:

New Adult

Science Fiction

Publish Date:

December 3, 2019

Publisher:

Harper Perennial

Synopsis:

Charles Soule brings his signature knowledge—and wariness--of technology to his sophomore novel set in a realistic future about a brilliant female scientist who creates a technology that allows for the transfer of human consciousness between bodies, and the transformations this process wreaks upon the world.

Inside a barn in Ann Arbor, Michigan, a scientist searching for an Alzheimer’s cure throws a switch—and finds herself mysteriously transported into her husband’s body. What begins as a botched experiment will change her life—and the world—forever…

Over two decades later, all across the planet, “flash” technology allows individuals the ability to transfer their consciousness into other bodies for specified periods, paid, registered and legal. Society has been utterly transformed by the process, from travel to warfare to entertainment; “Be anyone with Anyone” the tagline of the company offering this ultimate out-of-body experience. But beyond the reach of the law and government regulators is a sordid black market called the darkshare, where desperate “vessels” anonymously rent out their bodies, no questions asked for any purpose - sex, drugs, crime... or worse.

Anyone masterfully interweaves the present-day story of the discovery and development of the flash with the gritty tale of one woman’s crusade to put an end to the darkness it has brought to the world twenty-five years after its creation. Like Blade Runner crossed with Get Out, Charles Soule’s thought-provoking work of speculative fiction takes us to a world where identity, morality, and technology collide.

*Excerpt*

CHAPTER 1

A FARM, THIRTY-FOUR MILES SOUTHWEST
OF ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN

NOW

Beautiful.

Gabby tapped a few keys on her control board, and the overheads went out. Her gear was now providing the only illumination in the barn. The lights danced over the arched roof and the support beams like a planetarium laser show, its soundtrack the pulsing whine of the apparatus.

Gabrielle watched, delighted despite everything.

She wished someone else were there, maybe even Paul, because what was the point of seeing something lovely if the only other beings that saw it were Alzheimer’s-afflicted rats?

A little glint at the corner of her vision—light reflecting off the framed photo next to her laptop.

The Kitten, Gabby thought. Oh, Kat would love /

She was back inside the house, upstairs, holding her baby, looking right into her eyes. She looked into them and saw her own.

The shade they shared was nothing special—dark brown, sometimes deepening to near black, depending on the light—but it wasn’t the color. It was the life. The bright desire to see, to know, to wrest understanding from everything there was to understand. She had it, and so did her daughter.

The first time Gabrielle had seen this reflection in and of herself, a rush of emotion had flooded through her—a bucket of joy upended above her head. A recognition that someone else out there saw the world as she did, or at least a hope. She would never have thought it would matter so much, the idea that she wasn’t alone in her world and the way she perceived it and what she wanted from it—but it did.

The Kitten was dangling over her crib, held gently in Gabby’s hands, a smile lighting up her chubby infant face.

So… either she had just lifted the baby up from her crib, or she was placing her gently back down after a feeding or a diaper change or perhaps just a few minutes of holding, of connection.

Gabby had absolutely no idea which it was. She couldn’t remember. In fact, she couldn’t remember leaving the barn to walk back to the house. She couldn’t remember coming upstairs to the baby’s room. She couldn’t remember anything at all after the barn.

The barn… and the lights.

This was wrong. It was completely wrong.

Gabrielle’s hands clenched, and the baby’s eyes—her big eyes, in the little face—widened in surprise.

Gabby’s hands. Were they, in fact, hers? They were thicker, larger than they should be.… Whose hands were they, then? That was a question.

She let go of her daughter, and her daughter fell. Not far, a foot or eighteen inches, and she landed on the double padding of her diaper and the crib’s bedding, barely an impact at all—but still—Gabrielle had dropped her child.

A moment of stunned surprise as they looked at each other— and even though Kat wasn’t hurt, couldn’t possibly be hurt, she was definitely shocked, and then, justifiably, outraged.

A lusty, wounded wail poured up from the crib, and Gabby gripped its railing, curling her too-thick, too-big fingers between the slats, specifically designed to prevent even the most curious infants from slipping their vulnerable necks between them.

She turned away from the crib, slowly, hearing her daughter’s crying kick into a higher gear. She could feel the thickness, the bigness across her entire body.

On the dresser, her latest knitting project, a thickly woven blue-and-red tassel hat she would put up on her Etsy store once it was done, part of an ongoing effort to bring in extra cash. Next to it, the big navy-blue mug with a bright yellow M on it, a University of Michigan logo item. But she didn’t remember bringing it up here, and whatever was in it was still hot. She could see the steam.

Gabrielle completed her rotation and saw her husband, looking at her, wide-eyed. He looked stunned, like when she’d told him she was pregnant.

“Paul?” she said, and heard his voice say the word, and saw her husband open his mouth and say the word, but it wasn’t coming from him. It was coming from her, but she wasn’t herself.

Gabby lifted her hand to her face. Paul, staring at her, did the same thing. She touched her cheek, felt the little scratch of stubble there, completely alien, repulsive, but also not—a sensation familiar from weekends when he wouldn’t bother to shave unless they were planning to go out, or, it seemed more likely than not, that they’d be having sex that night. She watched Paul mirror this movement too.

This made sense, she realized, because she was looking in a mirror, the mirror mounted above the dresser in her daughter’s room, decorated with little blue musical notes painted on its frame by the hand she now somehow possessed but had no real right to.

She wasn’t looking at Paul. She was looking at herself. And she was him.

~~~

Praise for ANYONE

“(Anyone) is fast-paced and suspenseful. Soule’s uncomfortable vision of the future will please readers of cutting-edge speculative fiction. ” —Publishers Weekly

“With his second novel, Anyone, Charles Soule establishes himself as an author that readers of speculative fiction will love for years to come. The book will leave you thinking about gender, power, and what it means to be human for long after the final chapter.” —Jennifer Wright, author of Get Well Soon: History’s Worst Plagues and the Heroes That Fought Them

“Soule has wrapped a sharp, prescient investigation of the human mind inside a breakneck thriller that will have you riveted until the very last twist. Anyone is truly a book for everyone.” —Peng Shepherd, author of The Book of M

“I spent much of my childhood inside DARPA, where my father was Deputy Director, and this book captures the imagination and double-edged sword of our greatest scientific leaps. The same technology that can cure the world’s ills might also cause us to spiral into our own greed, selfishness, and vanity. Charles Soule’s Anyone is a remarkable, consequential novel and a terrifying wake-up call.” —Susan Henderson, author of The Flicker of Old Dreams

“Anyone is an intense, superbly crafted, edge of your seat thrill ride. I loved the two slowly converging storylines, not to mention the most dedicated, hardcore character I’ve read in a long, long time. Who would you be if you could be anyone? I’d really like to be Charles Soule and have written this book.” —Sylvain Neuvel, author of Sleeping Giants

“An imaginative, time-fragmented thriller about the bitter and potentially deadly consequences of body-snatching. Readers won’t feel that they’re on the edge of their seats as much as they’re on a balance beam above a pit of lava while trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube.” —Kirkus Reviews

~~~~~

**About the Author**

Photo Content from Marc Lemoine

Charles Soule is a Brooklyn, New York-based novelist, comic book writer, musician, and attorney. While he has worked for DC and other publishers, he is best known for writing Daredevil, She-Hulk, Death of Wolverine, and various Star Wars comics from Marvel Comics (Darth Vader, Poe Dameron, Lando and more), and his creator-owned series Curse Words from Image Comics (with Ryan Browne) and Letter 44 from Oni Press (with Alberto Jimenez Alburquerque.)

His first novel, The Oracle Year, about a man who can see the future and way this ability changes the world, will be released in April 2018 by the Harper Perennial imprint of HarperCollins.

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