Good News For Those Post-Super Bowl, End-of-Football Season Blues!
For diehard fans who'd love just one more game there's the Ultra Bowl.
If you’re one of the millions of football fans going through post-season withdrawal, there’s a “fix” — it’s called Ultra Bowl. Haven't heard of it? That's because it hasn't happened yet. But you can read about it in the new sci-fi novel, ULTRA BOWL.
ULTRA BOWL is an adventure fable about football, robots and time-travel. On their way home from the Super Bowl, an NFL team — the New York Knights — is “time-napped” and transported 100 years into the future when world power and tech supremacy is decided in a football game played by robots.
The “time-napped” Knights discover they’ve been “drafted” to play for the United States in the Ultra Bowl. Initially, unaware that they’ll be playing against state-of-the-art robots, they eventually discover the truth: they’re expendable pawns in a brilliant technocrat’s plot to rule the world.
Despite the insurmountable odds — it’ll be more like a mass execution than a football game — the Knights embark on this suicide mission for the heart of a beautiful woman, the soul of a young boy and the humanity of an entire world. In this epic struggle between man and machine, an NFL team valiantly attempts to rescue the future from the tyranny of technology.
ULTRA BOWL is more than a sci-fi adventure fable, it’s also a cautionary tale about the dangers of our Digital Age and the dystopian future toward which we may be heading. ULTRA BOWL has been in the news lately—not as science fiction, but as a plausible possibility for the future of football.
Recent Op-Eds in two major daily newspapers — the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution — have discussed ULTRA BOWL and provocative issues it raises about the crises facing football. Veteran sports journalist, Mike Freeman, ends his new book, Two Minute Warning: How Concussion, Crime, and Controversy Could Kill the NFL, by speculating about the future ULTRA BOWL depicts.
One day, because of the toll football takes on the human body, perhaps not so far in the future, robots will play football.
That is the premise of a science fiction book called Ultra Bowl. In the book, the concern over football violence combined with technological innovation leads to a future 100 years from now in which the violence in football is outsourced to robots. Go ahead and laugh. They laughed at Galileo, too. (Actually, they imprisoned him, but you get the point.)
"Robot football became the perfect vehicle for Corporate America's relentless drive to sell and profit," the author, I. J. Weinstock, explained in one interview. "Where once the Super Bowl was the most prized, viewed and expensive ad space, an actual game of robots, showcasing the latest technology while competing in a world championship, would become one big ad. The game's point-spread would determine tech supremacy, stock price and ultimately market share. It would be called the Ultra Bowl because if a nation stumbled, stocked tumbled and economies crumbled.
"The financial interests of Wall Street will combine with the political support of a growing segment of Main Street for whom football is too violent, to make robot football not only plausible, but probable," Weinstock said. "Science fiction writers try to imagine what tomorrow might look like, and they've often been right. Credit cards, radar, solar power, voice mail, flat-screen TVs, virtual reality, even atomic bombs were all first imagined by science fiction writers."
I'm not laughing.
ULTRA BOWL is published by DreaMaster Books and available in paperback and Kindle on Amazon.com..
