The Goodenough Summoning (The Goodenough Chronicles)
Shoutsalot, Elisha
Synopsis "The Goodenough Summoning (The Goodenough Chronicles)"
The Goodenough Summoning Book One of The Goodenough Chronicles Tobias Goodenough has always considered himself a man of useful general knowledge. Then a wall opens in his kitchen. One moment he is in Guildford explaining the finer points of simmering to his 141 YouTube subscribers. The next, he is on his knees in another world, clutching a spatula and wearing pyjama bottoms. Naturally, Tobias assumes the locals are primitive. Naturally, Tobias is wrong. The civilisation he has landed in moved beyond most of Earth’s greatest technological achievements more than a thousand years ago. His phone is a museum piece. His revolutionary ideas are children’s history lessons. And every attempt to improve things seems to create a new category of disaster. Unfortunately, getting home will require more than admitting he may not be the most advanced person in the room. Five components are needed to reopen the interworld gate, scattered across exhibitions, tournaments, monasteries, cities and laboratories. Joining Tobias on the journey are Aunty Chika, a formidable biochemist with experimental cooking habits; Lian Wei, a systems engineer with very little patience for avoidable stupidity; Bobo, a twelve-year-old entrepreneur who has already worked out how to monetise Tobias’s mistakes; Master Fen, who observes catastrophe with suspicious calm; and Chairman Goose, an ordinary grey goose with the confidence of a sovereign state. To get home, Tobias will have to do something considerably harder than inventing civilisation. He will have to learn how to notice what is already there. The Goodenough Summoning is a comic portal fantasy about misplaced confidence, accidental competence, technological assumptions, expert knowledge, and the dangerous belief that being from the future automatically makes you the cleverest person in the room. And, occasionally, about a goose. I think this is the version I’d use everywhere. It gives readers the comic premise immediately, introduces the ensemble, makes the larger quest clear, and signals that there is a proper idea underneath the absurdity without making the description sound philosophical or heavy. For platforms that offer a very short promotional field, I’d use: He arrived in another world ready to teach civilisation how to improve. Unfortunately, they are already eleven hundred years ahead of him. A comic portal fantasy featuring experimental soup, catastrophic innovation, one entrepreneurial child and an entirely ordinary goose.
