OK, the title of this post is mainly a pun I just couldn’t resist (the novel is largely set in a prototype habitat at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, after all). Oceanus is my newest novel, scheduled to be published May 4, 2024. You can read a sample chapter here and it’s available to pre-order—use this Universal Book Link to find it at your favourite online bookstore. But if you want to know more about Oceanus than just the tongue-in-cheek back cover teaser, here we go. I’m a writer who starts with a theme or concept, usually both, and builds my characters and plot to serve those. At the ti ..read more

Unless you buy the hardcover edition, you won’t see all the gorgeous artwork my cover artist provided, so here it is. Readers often wonder where writers get our ideas. Well, in the case of my newest novel Indigent Earth, a number of sources came into play. Worldwide, the year 2023 has been a year of fierce heatwaves, devastating droughts, rampant wildfires, and horrendous floods. Climate change is upon us. At the time I wrote Indigent Earth, things weren’t quite this extreme, but I knew they could get to be. I’d already taught a college course about climate change for a semester (I didn’t enj ..read more

Do you read books…sometimes? Or do you love books? Devour books? ’Cause if you’re the devouring kind, the process of finding your next great book to read is pretty limited. Friends recommending books to each other can go a long way, but we don’t all have the same tastes. Bestseller lists and the top offerings on the landing pages of sites like Amazon just channel us all toward the same few dozen choices that a lot of strangers have been led to (by the same lists and headers). Even book awards are pretty limiting—there are always biases toward certain kinds of books (I’m not talking about “woke ..read more

The publication date for my newest novel Augment Nation is now set for Saturday October 1, 2022. I’m thrilled to be able to bring this book to you, and very happy to be able to say that you can pre-order your own copy of Augment Nation today! The book’s Universal Book Link is https://books2read.com/Augment-Nation which means that when you click on that link it’ll take you to a page with links to find Augment Nation at any of the major online platforms where books are sold. If you have a preferred retailer, just click on that retailer’s logo, or even customize your choice so a UBL will always ..read more

Although I’ve mostly stopped writing regular blog posts, it’s still the best way to describe the next novel of mine to reach publication. And I truly believe this novel will be important. Why? Well, because Augment Nation takes place in the near future—probably during your lifetime—when projects like Elon Musk’s Neuralink will expand from addressing the needs of those with neurological impairments to the consumer population at large. I think implanted (or closely connected) brain-computer interfaces will become the next smartphones: devices that will provide such extensive augmentation of our ..read more

My novel The Dispossession of Dylan Knox is now available, tackling questions about love, trust, duty, and even our responsibility to the future of humanity. Especially the universal question: “Who do we really fall in love with? The person we see, or who they are inside?” Do we fall in love with someone because we like their looks? Or does real love require something deeper: a connection to the inner personality? Can our attraction to that ‘inner self’ be strong enough that outward appearance doesn’t even matter? When Brooke Chappelle, an assistant to the secretary general of the United Nati ..read more

The life of the average author isn’t much like the romanticized portraits you see on TV and in the movies (how do they all afford those loft apartments in New York City anyway??) But it does come with some unique “highs”. One of those is being able to introduce a brand new book into the world. The obvious comparison is to the birth of a child—obvious because it’s so accurate. Months of anxiety and labour culminating in a creation never seen before. My next creative “offspring” is still a couple of months from seeing the light of day, but I can show off the literary equivalent of an ultrasound ..read more

Courtesy of Blue Origin Space tourism is an expensive game, the playing field of billionaires. We witnessed the proof of that in recent weeks as first Richard Branson rode his Virgin Galactic space plane VSS Unity to the edge of space, 53 miles (85 km.) above the Earth on July 11th, and then Amazon’s Jeff Bezos traveled 66 miles up (106 km.) on July 20th in the first of his Blue Origin company’s New Shepard spacecraft to carry humans. The fact that both billionaires traveled aboard the first flights of their respective craft to such heights is either an exceptional testimony to their faith in ..read more

Time is really flying toward the launch of my new novel Naïda and my blood pressure’s probably flying high too, as I scramble to get everything done. Because of the pandemic, it’s going to be a virtual launch—online only—hosted by my friend and fellow author Mark Leslie (I narrate the audiobook editions of his A Canadian Werewolf in New York fiction series). But all are welcome. It’ll be short and sweet: 30 - 45 minutes during which I’ll give a reading from Naïda and Mark will field questions from the audience. We’ll also be giving away some copies of the book to those in attendance. Afterward ..read more

I’m pretty excited about my newest novel release Naïda. It’s now available for pre-order in e-book format from many retailers, with a launch/sale date of June 1, 2021. Print editions should be available to order soon through bookstores, though a technical problem at Amazon has been holding up the print process there for 2 weeks now (seriously—I am not impressed!) I’ll be doing a virtual launch on June 1st (thanks to Covid) so keep checking this space for the details on that. You can read a sample chapter here on my website, and I think you’ll really like it. Naïda is the story of Michael Hart ..read more