Welcome to the Future

They were promised tomorrow. Now they have to survive it.In the 1980s, at the height of the AIDS crisis, eleven terminally ill patients made an impossible choice: to be cryogenically frozen in the hope that science might one day save them.Decades later, they awaken in present-day America-disoriented, weakened, and very much alive-in a world that assumed they died long ago. The biotech firm that froze them believes the experiment ended in catastrophe. The doctors who led the project vanished. And the society they reenter bears little resemblance to the one they left behind.Hidden inside a facility on the outskirts of Los Angeles, the survivors struggle to make sense of the modern world while confronting the emotional wreckage of lives interrupted. They are men and women from different backgrounds, generations, and belief systems, bound together by a shared past shaped by stigma, secrecy, and loss. Some emerge stronger. Others fracture. Old wounds reopen. New alliances form.At the center of it all is Dr. Nathan Black, a young black gay physician-and the estranged son of the notorious family of black mad scientists behind the biotech firm.As Nathan clashes with the new head of the family empire-his formidable stepmother, Dr. Brenda Black-the stakes escalate far beyond the fate of the eleven survivors. What began as an act of medical desperation now threatens to expose decades of corruption, ambition, and moral compromise. The question is no longer whether the unfrozen few can adapt to the future, but whether the future is willing to make room for them at all.Blending speculative science fiction with mystery, dark humor, and sharp social observation, The Unfrozen Fewexplores survival in its many forms: surviving illness, surviving erasure, and surviving the consequences of choices made when there seemed to be no other options. It is a story about bodies and memory, about family legacies that refuse to die, and about what it means to wake up decades later and discover that history moved on without you.Bold, character-driven, and emotionally grounded, The Unfrozen Few launches an ambitious saga about identity, power, and the fragile line between salvation and exploitation. Randy Boyd was born and raised in Indianapolis, Indiana, and graduated from North Central High School in 1980. After two years at the University of Southern California, he transferred to UCLA, earning a B.A. in Sociology in 1985. During college, he was a yell leader at USC and a cheerleader at UCLA.Randy began writing professionally at age twenty through an early career in broadcast network promotion. His novels feature main characters who are black, gay, and living with HIV/AIDS, and have earned five Lambda Literary Award finalist honors.His fiction has appeared in Blackfire and in the anthologies Certain Voices (Alyson Books), Flesh and the Word 2(Plume), Sojourner: Black Gay Voices in the Age of AIDS (Other Countries), Flashpoint: Gay Male Sexual Writing(Masquerade Books), MA-KA: Diasporic Juks (Sister Vision), and Freedom in this Village: Black Gay Men's Writing 1969 to the Present (Carroll & Graf).His nonfiction has been featured in Art and Understanding, BeyondChron.com, The Washington Blade, The Lambda Book Report, Friends and Lovers: Gay Men Write About the Families They Create (Dutton), Frontiers, The Gay and Lesbian Review, The James White Review, Au Courant, and The Indiana Word.He has also contributed to Outsports.com and the publications of the Black AIDS Institute.