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FREE! Main Stage, Haddon & Frazer Aves. Jon McGoran seems most at home in the very near future, building worlds that are recognizable and believable, but a bit jarring in their differences. So, during a chat with the author on a recent summer day, with gusty thunderstorms and flash flooding on the way after a week of temperatures near 100 degrees, while wildfires continued blazing in the north, few topics of conversation might be more jarring than the weather.
“I think at this point it is impossible to write a believable near future without including climate change,” he tells us, “whether as an incidental aspect of the worldbuilding, or as a central theme.” His new science fiction thriller, The Price of Everything, ratchets up to a climate apocalypse, awash in corruption and political side effects.
The protagonist of the novel is Pierce, a private courier of high-denomination currency operating in a world where cyberwarfare has led to an all-cash economy. When Pierce arrives at his latest destination and discovers that his payload has mysteriously vanished, he knows he’s in deep trouble. His journey to solve the disappearance and clear his name before his own guild’s assassins catch him collides with money launderers, shell corporations, climate activists, drug dealers and privatized police forces. Pierce is tough, street-wise, and yearning to reunite with the woman he loves, a victim of terrible climate consequences.
“At its core, The Price of Everything is about how greed and corruption undermine our efforts to confront climate change, and how those least responsible bear the brunt,” Jon tells us. “The longer we put off dealing with the problem, the bolder and more drastic the eventual response will have to be.”
Jon is the author of eleven novels for adults and young adults, including his ecological thrillers Drift, Deadout, and Dust Up, and YA thrillers Spliced, Splintered, and Spiked — near-future science fiction that Kirkus calls, “Timely, thrilling, and more than a little scary.”
It takes a long time to write a book that has been declared finished as many times as The Price of Everything, as Jon declares in the novel’s acknowledgements pages. Central ideas for this book began percolating more than a decade ago. One idea that has fascinated Jon for many years is physical currency as a vulnerability, particularly to a society that is obsessed with money. “I have played around with many different versions of this over the years,” he tells us, “including the idea of a bad actor deploying a bioweapon that is spread through cash, and what kind of impact that would have on a capitalist society if the money that ran it was suspect.” Jon ended up taking the idea in a different direction, but over the years, as he continued to develop this story (between writing the Spliced books), other ideas attached themselves to it.
“I think in a lot of ways the book is ultimately hopeful,” he tells us. “It acknowledges that things are bad and in many ways are getting worse, but it leaves open the door to bold action.”
When not writing novels and short fiction, teaching in Drexel University's Creative Writing MFA program, or cohosting The Liars Club Oddcast, Jon works as a freelance writer, ghostwriter, developmental editor, and writing coach. And if that doesn’t sound like he’s been busy enough, Jon has been a featured author several times over the past decade at the Collingswood Book Festival, which is, in his words, “a great opportunity to meet readers and other authors and book people of all stripes (and checks and plaids). Usually, when you meet a reader, it is because they liked your work, which is incredibly affirming in itself—not just that they like your work, but that they get it, that they understand what you’re trying to do.”
Jon is intrigued when readers pick up on something he might not have intended, or when they understand his work in a way he hadn’t expected. That’s an indication how his books are open to interpretation, that once released into the world, they no longer belong to the author, but instead to the readers.
This year, on Saturday, October 4 at 10 am, Jon McGoran will be the first in the lineup of presenting authors featured in the main tent.
“I love the Collingswood Book Festival!” he tells us. “It’s an amazing event with an upbeat atmosphere. It always gives me hope for the future.”
Visit the website for the full schedule and festival details.
https://www.collingswoodbookfestival.com/adult-authors-events
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
771 Haddon Ave., Collingswood, NJ, United States, New Jersey 08108
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