A SCIFI/YA READ FOR ALL AGES

"Whether you’re a Young Adult or an Aging Elder … it doesn’t matter. The Last Football Player by talented author John Blossom is a wonderful read (and a great listen as well) for any lover of the written (or narrated) word! Are you a young buck still in high school? … a middle-aged empty-nester wondering where all the years and kids went? … or a certain-aged doddering forebear pining for the good ole days? Whatever you are, this story was made for you. Never played football? No problemo; the gridiron plays, strategies, and scoring are all well explained. You don’t even have to like the game, although a proclivity for the sport wouldn't hurt.

"The scene is a kinda-sorta near-future Silicon Valley where two large tech corporations, Zeta (Meta?) and Circle (Apple/Google?) vie for dominance in the all-consuming world of technowizardry. Zeta and Circle families tend to send their offspring to competing local schools — Zeta kids go to a down-to-earth “PC-based” “Zinkerburg Academy” and Circle kids attend a somewhat more artsy/fartsy “Honeycrisp School.” The curricula of both schools emphasize technology but Honeycrisp’s advanced TechLAB is more than a few cuts above Zinkerburg’s. It sports a giant universal 3D printer which can print virtually anything conceivable, an enclosed Battlebot Arena where near-human Bots of every ilk are built, tested and refined, and numerous classrooms/studios where students only (sorry, no parents allowed) can explore and develop their technical dreams.

"Enter the world of phone glasses, gravity beds, helicars, universal 3D printers, Lithium powerpaks, Tikflash, Instasnap, scannerbots, and minidrones. Take a flyer and dive into the deep-end of Dude McPherson’s teenage pool of tech hormones, raging acne, and wide-eyed enthusiasm. And if you dare, take a sip of a delicious bowl of technological alphabet soup, teeming with little white pasta letters like VR, AI, IRL, U3D, USB and, like um, all the other hip jargon of the awkward, growing-up years.

"It seems that Dude’s dad, Dudley McPherson, Sr. is an anxious helicopter parent, hovering over his son and his entire generation to protect them from the scourge of contact sports with all its consequent injuries and lifelong trauma. As an influential parent on the board of Honeycrisp School, he’s hell-bent on banning football and other contact sports altogether. “They are very risky and frankly unneeded in the modern world,” says McPherson. But son Dude thinks otherwise. He’s an eighth-grade star wide receiver at Honeycrisp who absolutely loves football with a passion. He just doesn’t understand his Dad’s unreasonable stance on the matter; not even when he is badly injured and hospitalized as a Freshman in Honeycrisp’s first big game of the season against Zuckerberg.

“Next, meet Dude’s coterie of newfound besties including Tomly Newton, an attractive female volleyball athlete who has given up sports in favor of becoming the TechLab’s student proctor, (and soon becomes a star virtual football quarterback!); Adam Angelou, a downright serious geek who can build, program, and repair just about any conceivable digital-electro-mechanical device; Allison Albright, a liberal arts-oriented student who has developed an artificial intelligence capability which transforms human thoughts and feelings into various art forms. Finally, there is “Master,” the sort of chargé d’affaires of Honeycrisp’s TechLab, a superannuated female AI with a love of unbridled liberalism and a penchant for communicating in passable iambic pentameter.

"The story proceeds apace with the Honeycrisp kids’ drive to develop a realistic and authentic robotic football game sans all the violence and injuries. No wonky or passé video games for these kids; they develop and build real “live” robots to man the scrimmage line, imbuing each player with real “live” human thoughts, feelings, and sensibilities to drive them toward victory on the gridiron. The final big contest between the good Circle guys and the baddies of Zeta ends with a tied score, but it’s clear who the real winners are. Altogether, The Last Football Player is a solid, satisfying read or listen for ageless masses. And the older ones might even learn a thing or two about not just football but the game of life!”

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