[Nicolai P. Zwar]

My novel, which I had given the working title “Charon’s Fare” if I remember correctly, opens with the investigation of a possible homicide in a pleasure-dome brothel, where a client has accidentally killed a real human being, being in shock and insisting that he didn’t know that she was real, believing her to be a pleasure droid. It turns out, the killed human was the daughter of the CEO of a software company that provides chips for the artificial intelligence programming of droids (including the semi-legal “pleasure droids” used in certain contexts). The daughter had gone into hiding for reasons not quite clear (in the first chapters, various theories are from people who knew her when questioned by the investigators, but none of them quite fall into place… on their own.).
One of the investigators (and one of the main characters) was a cop who was widowed three years prior to the happenings of the novel, and who is herself increasingly estranged from her daughter. That contrasts with her colleague, who is a happily married family man, yet not with a secret of his own… it was a mix of a psychological sci-fi detective story, or if I look back at it from today, a sort of “BLADE RUNNER meets CITIZEN KANE” with sex-robots, written in the style (of my then heroes) Harlan Ellison and William Gibson… Note: I’m not saying my writing was as good as theirs, only saying I was trying to be as good as them. It was one of several aborted attempts I made at writing an actual novel (I still have an non-aborted attempt in my figurative desk drawer).