STEPFATHER BANK

"First-rate satire with a serious core" – Library Journal

  "A highly original cautionary tale . . . on more levels than the reader might first suspect." – Analog

 "A jaunty, corkscrew ride through a skewed future" – Alan Dean Foster

 "It stands as savvy satire. It also stands as a diverting, thinking person's thriller." – The Virginian-Pilot

 The year is 2110, and the Bank owns everything.

It's called simply The Bank because its full name is six hundred and sixty-six words long. Over its first ten years it secretly gained controlling interests in Google, Disney, China National Petroleum, Deutsche Bank, Amazon, Colombia, Fox, Egypt, and the Mafia, among many other international corporations, cartels, and governments. Occasional mentions of the Bank's existence were quickly deleted, or ridiculed as the ravings of conspiracy theorists.

By the year 2110 it has owned Earth (et cetera) for generations. It's eliminated armies and armaments, governments and war, cash and crime, discrimination and religion. It employs, is owed by, and so rules everyone in the world.

 Except Monaghan Burlew.

He's the only one outside the System. The only human on the planet who's free.

 This, unfortunately, does not make him heroic, or even appetizing. Burlew is grossly fat. Of Class V (unknown) parentage, he's never been educated beyond Low English and basic computing. He seldom bathes. His green joggies stink as badly as the hopeless "pomes" he declaims in public squares.  He limps because his bare toes were chewed by dogs one bitter July night in Sydney.

 He also has no idea that, very shortly, he will be Earth's last hope of surviving an interplanetary catastrophe….