Blog tour: The Great Convergence

Welcome to the blog tour for The Great Convergence by Thomas Kast!

More about the book…

10.000.002 A.D. A cantankerous scholar slipping into obscurity is out for revenge. He time-travels to the year 2022 to stop his nemesis, Scott — a successful scientist at a competing university — from thwarting his research into the origin of a mysterious phenomenon, the Great Convergence. Shrewd and ruthless, Scott will stop at nothing to defend his tenure track. The feud quickly spins out of control and the damage to reality grows unchecked.

Caught in the crosshairs are three characters responsible for triggering the Great Convergence: an art-hating professional art critic who, unbeknownst to him, spontaneously switches between universes wreaking havoc as he goes; a talentless artist whose sculptures act as trans-universal portals; and a schizophrenic astrophysicist trying to avert the invasion of alternate versions of himself from different realities. As their paths converge, the apocalyptic event takes place and the inescapable tragedy of human existence unfolds.

A subversive philosophical science fiction and a social satire, the Great Convergence will take you out of your comfort zone, exposing the absurdity of many ethical and intellectual ideals.

If you like the wry humour of the likes of Kurt Vonnegut and Douglas Adams, or the philosophical insights of Stanislaw Lem this could be the one for you. Click the buy now button and enter the world of tomorrow today.

More about the author…

Thomas Kast is an award-winning independent photojournalist and illustrator based in Zurich, Switzerland and has published a number of photography art books. Thomas spent a big part of his life in Israel, where he taught graphic design, photography, and illustration at the Shenkar College of Engineering and Design and other Israeli colleges. An incongruous rhetorician with Asperger’s syndrome, Thomas always knows best despite all evidence pointing to the contrary. 

Long time in the making, his debut novel — a philosophical science fiction piece, the Great Convergence — evokes many of the author’s real-life experiences fused with his unhinged fantasies. Currently, the author is preparing a philosophical sci-fi comic series, due to be published in the coming July 2022.

And now, an extract from the book…

My name is not important. Neither is what I do — I’m an investigative ontology researcher. It’s a field you’ve probably never heard of, at a comparatively undistinguished university you’ve definitely never heard of.

In my line of work, I periodically declare scholarly pronouncements in the form of scientific articles no one has any interest in, except my fellow academics who cursorily thumb through and subsequently evaluate my work based on their ever-fluctuating level of pettiness and professional jealousy.

Long story short, I’m an alcoholic …

26/09/10,000,002 10:38

It’s a sunny morning out there. I draw the black curtains of my university office, trying to concentrate on anything except the relevant task at hand — an academic piece on the Great Convergence — a perpetually confounding event and a once-fashionable research subject I’ve been sweating over for several millennia.

***

The ancient scrolls of Wahatta Upanishad define the Great Convergence as an event of divine origin alleged to bring about the ultimate victory of good over evil, ensuing after many visually stunning celestial battles and breathtaking cataclysms.

Another ancient text — Quantum Mechanics — describes it as a sharp acceleration of the subatomic disorder on a macro scale, culminating in a complete and irreversible reorganisation of the elementary building blocks of nature.

The modern science refers to the matter at hand in a more concise, if a tad dry, manner: Big Bang inside out. Combine the three together, and you’ll get a reasonably accurate characterisation.

***

I sink deeper into my armchair behind a rickety desk littered with heavyweight folios, torn-out pages and half-empty whisky glasses — six of them in all. Exhaling loudly through my nostrils, I keep jotting down impulsive ideas until I catch myself scribbling silly shapes on the page margins. I empty half of the glasses and refill the rest. Three down, three more to go.

The ominous silence keeps throbbing in my head. I toss a crumpled note into the ecological wormhole disposal shaft to my right. Down it goes with a soft and melodious tinkle. A puff of pink smoke fills the study with a pleasant scent of vanilla. The familiar ding confirms that the pellet has reached its destination— Planet Earth, the twenty-first century — the time of the Great Convergence. Coincidently … Or not …?