The Crossover Wars - Winslow, S. Warren

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Résumé :
The first story of the The Crossover Wars covers a time span of about twenty years in the life of Hurricane Katrina orphan Nigel Boyd Renoir as he grows to manhood. When we first meet Nigel, he's a patient in Sand Ridge Asylum for the Criminally insane, telling a rather maudlin tale of unrequited love for a woman named Angeline Arlander to a detective who's investigating the mysterious disappearance of Nigel's less beloved live-in girlfriend, Dana Lacy. As the story progresses, Nigel discovers that he is a person with several incarnations in divergent realities and a recurring individual throughout a multiverse he never knew existed. Every version of him is the same, but different in personality, situation and point of view. All of them are matched with, married or engaged to their versions of Angeline, leaving our Nigel as the only one living without her. The actions he takes to assuage a longing for his own version of this eternal love sets alight the inferno that becomes the Crossover Wars. Later in the tale, we are introduced to a Marine Corps General and his wife. They have been stand-ins for Nigel's own mother and father ever since he wandered into their lives at the age of five, but these adopted parents' true identities are revealed in the course of the narrative as an unexpected, heart-stopping twist. The Crossover Wars is a work of science fiction, military action and a love story - a commentary on race and racism along with a tale of families in crisis, all combined in one book. There are malicious mad geniuses concocting pandemic viruses, forcibly mutated humanity who become malignant aliens and gun blazing battles in the Utah desert overseen by a red-caped military officer. The action storms through at least three different versions of the United States of America, where the book was written. With all of that, other elements of the story are still close enough to reality for the reader to feel that this could happen here...

Biographie:
S. Warren Winslow grew up watching every Star Trek series ever produced and reading science fiction stories, losing himself all of their incarnations and permutations. When the original Star Wars movies rolled out, he was there to see every one of them, too. He could spend hours reading stories of King Arthur's Knights of The Round Table, Louis L'amour's tales of The Sacketts, W. E. B. Dubois' books, Tom Clancy's stories, Roger Zelazny's tales of Amber and other great books of action, adventure, science fiction and fantasy. He collected Marvel and DC Comics, Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction, Omni and Analog magazines, until his family ran out of spare footlockers to store these in. After graduating from high school, S. Warren Winslow went to Perkinston Community College on the Gulf Coast as a Mechanical Engineering student, later transferring to The University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg to major in Architectural Engineering and Drinking. Eventually, the income he was generating for higher education by working three jobs fell behind in the race to keep up with tuition hikes, so he did the only sensible thing; used what he had to buy a motorcycle and spend the days riding, his evenings waiting tables and conjuring up short Science Fiction/Fantasy stories during his sober nights. For the time being, he'd continue writing and creating the type of tales that he thought might seem agreeable to the world he lived in, submitting these to his formerly favorite magazines. Those were the days of rejections. One day, after years of attending RLU (Real Life University) had finally made him a little wiser, S. Warren Winslow decided to write the type of sci-fi story he'd always wanted to compose. One of his incomplete stories, titled Goodbye Angeline he took apart and used its bones in creating The Crossover Wars (Goodbye Angeline Unabridged), completing that work in 2019. He is currently working on his next Nigel Renoir and Angeline Duplessis-Renoir story.