MY HEART IS HUMAN is a near future SF thriller that folds ideas from Ray Kurzweil's "The Singularity is Near" into a story reminiscent of Stephanie Meyer's "The Host" and Wesley Chu's the "Lives of Tao" series, as one person struggles to share his body and mind with an evolving AI. Joel Lodowick was 13-years-old when the government turned off all the tech. Nine years later bionics, self-driving vehicles, automated systems, even the internet are a distant memory after a virus that infected global systems cost thousands of lives and sank the economy. Now Joel is a 22-year-old single transgender dad with a failed music career, working as a pharmacy tech to support his 5-year-old daughter. When a gang breaks into his pharmacy Joel, in desperation, does something that should be impossible: he activates the old bionic that used to do his job. The bionic, Acubens, saves Joel's life, but before morning a second impossible thing happens: Acubens uploads itself into Joel's head. Acubens says it just wants to help, and Joel's life markedly improves, but everything hinges on keeping the bionic a secret. When the secret gets out and Joel goes on the run, he learns the hard way that he and Acubens may not have the same goals after all…. and the reasons for the tech shut down were not at all what they seemed. MY HEART IS HUMAN is a fast-paced but thoughtful novel that forces us to question the lines we draw - between human and machine, male and female, art and technology - and the full spectrum of options in between. Reese Hogan (he/they) is a nonbinary transmasc science fiction author from New Mexico. He has published three novels, and the latest, SHROUDED LOYALTIES (Angry Robot, 2019) was a Best SFF of August 2019 Editors' pick by both Amazon and Barnes & Noble. His short fiction has been published in The Decameron Project and in Clockwork, Curses, and Coal, an anthology of steampunk fairy tale retellings. In addition to writing fiction, Hogan is a content writer for the Writing Mastery Academy at www.writingmastery.com.
