What's Up?
The Kingdom of Clockwork series paperbacks will not be made available through Amazon until conditions for Amazon warehouse employees are greatly improved.
Life & Work
Bio:
Billy O’Shea is an Irishman who has lived in Scandinavia for more than thirty years. Among his sources of inspiration for Kingdom of Clockwork, he cites Hans Christian Andersen, the Irishman Jonathan Swift and the 17th-century English science fiction writer Francis Godwin.
Publications:
Kingdom of Clockwork is a series of science fiction/steampunk novels by Billy O’Shea, set in a clockwork world that arises in Scandinavia following the collapse of civilisation. Lacking fossil fuels and knowledge of past technology, the new kingdoms of the northern lands can draw only upon the power of the wind, which they store using clockwork. But the King of Kantarborg has a plan to mine other secrets of the past, and weaves a young court clockmaker into his dangerous schemes.
The Kingdom of Clockwork series has been described as “alternate history, historical fantasy and steampunk”. The books are quirky, intriguing, humorous tales of reason, magic and human cunning. Real Scandinavian history and locations are combined with flights of fancy, both literal and metaphorical.
The Kingdom of Clockwork series is available as paperbacks, audiobooks and e-books. The e-books are available from Amazon, and the audiobooks from Audible, Mofibo, and most audiobook publishers. The paperbacks are only available at this site and at a few selected bookshops. They can also be purchased in the gift shop of the Round Tower of Copenhagen.
The Recôncavo is an almost invisible center-of-gravity. Circumscribing the Bay of All Saints, this region was landing for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history. Not unrelated, it is also birthplace of some of the most physically & spiritually uplifting music ever made. —Sparrow
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers: Personal recording engineer for Prince, inc. "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"... Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory
I'm Pardal here in Brazil (that's "Sparrow" in English). The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay. They paid.
MATRIX MUSICAL
The Matrix was built below among some of the world's most powerfully moving music, some of it made by people barely known beyond village borders. Or in the case of Sodré, his anthem A MASSA — a paean to Brazil's poor ("our pain is the pain of a timid boy, a calf stepped on...") — having blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south, before he was silenced. (that's me left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) ... The Matrix started with Sodré, with João do Boi, with Roberto Mendes, with Bule Bule, with Roque Ferreira... music rooted in the sugarcane plantations of Bahia. Hence our logo (a cane cutter).