Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart walks into the sex change clinic, determined to have his "sprouter" snipped off. So begins The Amadeus Net, a satirical novel set in the year 2028, which explores art, love, and identity at the end of the world. For more than two centuries, the one-time wunderkind has kept his existence secret while he tried to understand his immortality. Living in style through funds raised by selling "lost" Mozart works, he has also helped to create Ipolis, a utopian city-state, after the cataclysmic Shudder, a global disaster caused by an asteroid strike in 2015. But a few complications mar Mozart's utopia. The woman he loves is a lesbian, which, paradoxically, makes him forget about his sex-change plans. The world's greatest reporter knows he's still alive and will stop at nothing to expose him. The stakes are higher than he knows, because if the reporter finds him, so will the spy planning to sell Mozart's DNA to the highest bidder. Oh, and, by the way, the world might end in seven days. His only allies are a psychotic American artist, a bland Canadian diplomat, and the city itself: a sapient, thinking machine that is screwing up as only a sapient, thinking machine can.

Human-shaped, monkey-loving, robot-fighting, pirate-hearted, storytelling junkie, Mark is actually Canadian. By day he is a university prof and by night, a writer of humorous, satirical and fabulist novels, squibs and other drivel. (Some pure, and some quite tainted with meaning.) The Fatness is his newest novel. The Fridgularity (2012) won an IndieReader Discovery Prize for best humor. Pirate Therapy and Other Cures is a collection of short fiction. Marvellous Hairy is his second novel. His first book, The Amadeus Net, is heavier on the robots.

You can read more of his fiction (for free) at his website where you can also dig into his irregular and explosive blog, The Skwib (markarayner.com). Follow him at Twitter (@markarayner) or on Facebook (www.facebook.com/RaynerWriting).

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