Named Finalist in the American Fiction Awards 2024 (category Science Fiction: Cyberpunk), The Logoharp describes a coming-of-age of a young American journalist who chooses to work as a media propagandist for China in the 22nd century. Naomi is surgically transplanted, giving her extraordinary powers of foresight and physical strength. Half-human, half-robotic, her unique role for China isn't to report current events, but to foresee and report the future, ensuring the smooth progression of history as dictated by her mysterious Logoharp. This so-called "Harp of Wisdom" is given only to journalistic elites, known as "Reverse Journalists," whose task is to fashion reality for the masses, deconstructing the past to produce a future of acceptable memories. In effect, the harp is a Naomi's universal translator and interpreter of political events and plans, encoding not only government agenda but a more mysterious array of voices and signals from unidentified sources.
The Logoharp allows Naomi to broadcast in all world languages, ensuring citizen compliance. But when she's tasked with finding a flaw in a State system that balances births and deaths, Naomi's suppressed human memories and emotions resurface, compelling her to act against the very institutions she supports. Her mission is made even more complex by unexpected love affairs with a biophysicist who has surgically enhanced her, and another Chinese journalist who treads a fine line between independent documentary and spying on behalf of the State.
This novel is based on the author's travels and reporting from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Indonesia, and Africa. It is rooted in the facts of two organized societies, China and America, competing today for resources, power, and hegemony. Moreover, the role of media is no longer limited to archiving the past; it is a crucible of social ideas and expression that shape and even predict future events.
From the novel cover:
She reports the future. And then it happens.
Naomi, half-human, half cyborg, is beyond prescient. She's a Reverse Journalist, working for China in the 22nd century. Naomi's job is to foresee and report the events and personalities of the future. Unlike conventional journalists who frame contemporary events, Naomi extrudes the "truth of probable outcomes" to ensure the smooth progression of history.
Driven by voices she hears in her Logoharp, a universal translator of instructions and signals from sources she can't identify, Naomi listens, speaks and broadcasts in all world languages, ensuring citizen compliance. But an encounter with a leading architect, Naomi's former lover who abandoned her in youth, forces recollections of her human inheritance and the role that chance, culture and racism played in her early life.
Naomi is tasked with finding a flaw in the architect's system that "balances" births and deaths on behalf of the State. But she grows uncomfortable, then furious. Guided by immortals and the dissonant Logoharp, Naomi experiences "unintentional contradiction." The rest isn't silence. She acts.