INVENTION IS A MOTHER
AVAILABLE NOW!
Chanticleer Humor/Satire, 2023
Chanticleer Science Fiction, 2023
Visionary Fiction Category
Humor/Comedy/Satire Category
American Legacy Book Awards, Visionary Fiction Category
Suggest a funny word or phrase, see your contribution in my next novel! What's funny to you?
Suggestions are anonymous, offer as many as you like, be kind. Folksy, absurd, weird, or double entendre words help your odds of publication!
The Suggestion Box is Open!
Funny Examples: snaggletooth, frazzled, catawampus
Not Funny Examples: laughable, unsubscribe, ALS
Invention Is a Mother
A feral engineer, a personality-flexible coworker, an alcoholic wormhole, and . . . Shaughnessy.
Could this lineup be better? Yes. Yes it could.
Shaughnessy is a passive bystander to his own life. He sleeps on a rented couch and relies on his programmable identiTee to maintain a façade of the normalcy he’s spent his whole adult life avoiding.
When his father is sidelined by a disease that is either psychosomatic or fatal, Shaughnessy reluctantly agrees to replace him at work – literally.
The search for meaning in absurdity has never been more desperate. Or ridiculous!
Reviews
“Full of boozy wormholes, sentient appliances, multiple Jesuses, and many other colorful sci-fi abstractions, this book will make you think, feel, and smile.”
—Dan Marshall, Author of Home Is Burning
“Rob Brownell extends the subterfuge of our current world of avatars and on-screen personas a few steps into the future, and it’s a wonderfully terrible place. ”
— Alison Jean Lester, Author of Glide
“A quirky cast, an unlikely hero…fans of oddball science fiction are going to love Invention Is a Mother.”
—Bill Burnett, Co-Author of Designing Your Life
“A sharp, wickedly funny look at science, fiction, life, death, pitch meetings, insane flights of fancy and technology that will either kill you or save you. I loved it.”
—Will Leitch, author of How Lucky
The group warmed up, like a chorus running through scales, by sharply critiquing management’s business acumen and their understanding of the physical world. They followed that with particularly vicious commentary about the choice of font in the placeholder logo. When everyone was suitably incensed about their time being wasted, they set to the business of idea generation.
— Brainstorming, the psychotic break of engineering, Invention Is a Mother
JUICY GOSSIP!
BREAKING NEWS!
JUICY GOSSIP! BREAKING NEWS!
She wanted to encourage him, but he was right. Overt strength of personality flowed down through the women in their family. He and their father were strong in the same way that quicksand is a danger—she understood it to be true but assumed she’d never see it for herself.
— Sammy thinks of Shaughnessy, Invention Is a Mother
The Story Behind Invention Is a Mother
Rob Brownell’s long-imagined dream of writing a novel transmogrified into a bucket-list priority after his ALS diagnosis in 2017.
Invention Is a Mother is the result: a slightly sci-fi, darkly comic (puns! crude humor! irreverence!), sometimes wrenching take on our product-centric technology culture. The plot—like real engineering projects—is a marriage of ambition and absurdity.
The novel was launched on Kickstarter in June, 2022, with a goal to raise as much money as possible for an ALS cause while also secretly duping people into buying the book.
Over 200 copies were sold, exceeding 400% of the funding goal. During the concurrent campaign for Team Gleason, nearly $12k was raised to support ALS patients with assistive technology.
Pretty cool, eh?
Invention Is a Mother is now available on all major bookselling websites.
“It’s an orphan disease. It’s not called that because it would orphan your children, though that would be completely accurate. It’s called an orphan disease because it’s rare. The disease lacks market presence, so to speak.”
— The neurologist explains, Invention Is a Mother
Meet Rob Brownell
Rob Brownell worked as a product designer at Function Engineering for a quarter of a century and is named on patents ranging from toys to medical devices. The absurd humor oozing out of his writing was distilled from 100% authentic corporate encounters. These days, he dictates from his wheelchair using Dragon voice control software. Invention Is a Mother is his first novel.
Meet ALS
ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis) is a progressive fatal neuromuscular disease popularized in the US by Lou Gehrig and Stephen Hawking. The rare condition is credited as MND (Motor Neuron Disease) in European productions.
ALS received a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019 for its dramatic depictions of a horrible death in Cinema, Literature, and Tortured Imaginations. Recently overshadowed by breakout star COVID-19, ALS returns in Invention Is a Mother with a haunting and understated performance as MFD (Mysterious Fatal Disease)!
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Last Spring I moved to a new wheelchair that is controlled by eye-gaze. I've also switched most of my time writing to eye-gaze typing. The technology seems to fascinate people so my son put together a video to show what it's like. Check it out! It's a dramatic story:
https://youtu.be/GBc8OHR4Ts0