Beautiful Shining People: The extraordinary, EPIC speculative masterpiece…

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His writing has appeared in Fast Company, VICE, The Guardian, Litro Magazine, The Irish Times, Screen, Quartz and others. It begins with Ezra sitting nervously in a room labelled as "Record label HQ, London" while holding a white disk with "Pretty Shining People Demo George Ezra" written on it in permanent marker. Part science fiction, part love story, part coming-of-age story, part dystopian, part thriller, Beautiful Shining People is a novel like no other with something for each and every reader. The world-building is amazing, Beautiful Shining People is steeped in Japanese culture and Japan a few decades from now is utterly believable and feels very real and authentic, as is the ongoing conflict between the world’s superpowers. The world didn’t seem unrealistic to me and there was so much mystery and YA intertwined that I actually grew to love their strange, futuristic world!

The story is underpinned by mystery and suspense, but it is so wonderfully textured and nuanced that it is also so much more. Similarly to his audition, the children are not impressed with Ezra's efforts and one child begins to help him adjust his smile.Michael Grothaus captures the electricity of the streets perfectly, contrasting that to the traditional temples and shrines that feature and inform the story.

The plot, while slow to build, does pay off and, most importantly, this is a book that has much to say about how we forge real-world connections in a digital world. to the dog Inu to that developing, tender relationship between Neotnia and John (and its inevitable strains and collapses). I love the way every genre blend brings it more and more humanity and it breaks my heart just a little more. Small things gave the world such an authentic feel: Neotnia having to constantly translate between John and Goeido; John's confusion over well behaved Neotnia's dog Inu is; the background plot of a brewing war between America and China playing out on TVs; the subtle mentions of a world slightly different from our own (the sky is littered with satellites, some still being built). The book examines the human impact that artificially generated video will have on individuals and society in the years to come.

Also, Neotnia believes that not having a vagina ( sic) and not being able to have sex marks her out from all other women. As speculative/sci-fi stories go, it presents a relatively optimistic and soft vision of the future, where robots have relieved humans of menial tasks, as opposed to taking over the creation of art, music, and books, or replacing interaction with other people.