Invention Is a Mother

In a near future where you are what you wear, can an idling young engineer successfully navigate corporate startup culture, accept his family's medical crisis, and harness his full creative potential?

"Rob Brownell's sharply written Invention Is a Mother somehow manages to be witty, absurd, playful, imaginative, cynical, sad, compelling, heartfelt, and darkly hilarious all in one. Full of boozy wormholes, sentient appliances, multiple Jesuses, automated buffets, and many other colorful sci-fi abstractions, this book will not only make you think and feel, but also smile."

-Dan Marshall, author of Home Is Burning

RESPONSIBILITY IS OVERRATED

As a recently graduated and happily unemployed engineer, Shaughnessy shirks responsibility whenever possible. He coasts through life, sidestepping every opportunity to follow in his father Walton's footsteps, until Walton begins to suspect that he has MFD (mysterious fatal disease).

The family coerces Shaughnessy to use his identiTee-a half-baked technology of programmable identity-to impersonate his father as a senior engineer at Critical Think Inc. There, he is immediately entangled in the development of an irrational consumer product: portable parking.

PROFOUND? OR PROFOUNDLY STUPID?

Pressured to innovate in the face of absurd challenges and the visionary CEO's fantastical demands, Shaughnessy teeters on the edge between breakthrough and breakdown.

Fans of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Good Omens, or Slaughterhouse Five will enjoy laugh-out-loud collisions with the limits of reason.

Rob Brownell's Invention Is a Mother is an insider's appreciation for the artistic minds of technologists amid a corporation's unrealistic expectations for innovation.

In his career as a mechanical engineer, Rob Brownell designed consumer products ranging from children's toys to medical devices. He is named on nearly thirty patents.

In 2017, he was diagnosed with ALS and was later confined to a wheelchair where he writes by means of voice control. Contrary to the fiction you might eventually read in his obituary, he is not bravely battling the disease-he is struggling to maintain a sense of humor while extending his creative life.

His first novel, Invention Is a Mother, was launched on Kickstarter in June 2022, closing at more than 400% funded. During that campaign, fans of the book raised over $11k in donations for Team Gleason, a nonprofit that provides assistive technology to ALS patients.