Michael Stutz

Circuits of the Wind: a Legend of the Net Age (Volume 2) Michael Stutz

LITERARY FICTION / AMERICAN LITERATURE

The Internet is everywhere now, but Ray Valentine saw it first explode.

Circuits of the Wind, a coming-of-age novel in three volumes, is the very human story of Ray's quest to find himself as he grows up online, wandering the computer underground--the wild, global outback that existed before the net went mainstream. How else does an end-of-century slacker reach out to the world from Sohola, that northern state that's a little more Midwest than it is New England? The net holds the key to what he's after--but even as he pioneers this virtual world, the veneer of his real life begins to crack.

In VOLUME TWO of the novel, the net arrives all glimmering when Ray is starting college: it's brighter, quicker, better than he ever knew. It's the early 1990s--a time of golden youth and of joyriding on the growing Internet, where he rises as a leader of the global generation, the ones who saw it as the gilded portal to a fabulous new age everyone was about to enter. But he's coasting aimlessly--and when his college friends move on and fashions change he sees how real life actually might not be working out.