Jellyfish Dreaming
This post-apocalyptic, post-gender, coming-of-age story pulses with plot twists and intrigue. It contemplates the tenacity of life and the capacity of hope, even when all seems lost.
On the cliffs above the Great Garbage Ocean, in a university’s aging experimental facility, Jack floats in a tank of poisonous jellyfish. The 200-year-old intersex street kid remembers things nobody else does, from before the environmental catastrophes that erased the world as we know it.
Now, jellyfish and insects are food staples, and everyone is sterile. Everyone, that is, except for some of the town’s orphaned survivors. Two of the University’s researchers believe they are humanity’s last hope.
Jack agrees to help, but then falls for his best friend, Joon – a tough, ageless “Warehouse kid” whose arrival complicates everything. As Jack’s feelings for Joon grow, so does the danger around them. When old bigotries erupt into violence, Jack must scramble to protect those he loves from a madman and save a dying world. But at what cost?
“Jellyfish Dreaming’s protagonist, Jack, is the embodiment of story, holding the history of a post-apocalyptic world in his DNA. He’s been recycled, uploaded and spit out, a witness to the living story of earth – while becoming unwitting glue to the future of the planet.” – Kirsten Mosher, artist & author of Soul Mate 180°& Plea$e Steal Me for 100 Plus Dollar-zz
“Jellyfish Dreaming is one of the most inventive stories I’ve read in a very long time.” – Rosanne Parry, author of the NYT Bestseller, A Whale of the Wild
Jellyfish Dreaming is a head trip like nothing you’ve read, weaving together climate, genetics, gender, biology and dreams in such a way it’s impossible to miss how they were always all one thing to begin with.– Michael J. DeLuca, author of Night Roll
D.K. McCutchen teaches writing for UMass Amherst’s College of Natural Sciences. Publications include The Whale Road, a Kiriyama Prize Notable Book & Pushcart nominee (creative non-fiction about sailing with whale researchers through the South Pacific to NZ), inclusion in several Fish Publishing Award anthologies for “The Glass Bitch,” “April Fool & The Feministas,” and “The Zen of Kakapo Poo,” writings in Fourth Genre, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Rosebud, Identity Theory, Lady Churchills’ Rosebud Wristlett, The Mossy Skull, and others. She currently writes hopeful, gender-bender-post-apocalyptic-speculative-fiction, including Jellyfish Dreaming a Leapfrog Global Fiction Young Adult Prizewinner judged by Rosanne Parry, and Massachusetts Cultural Council Finalist. The author lives on – and swims in – the cleanest watershed in Massachusetts with two brilliant daughters and a flightless Kiwi that followed her home from New Zealand (so she kept him).
