Novels

After reading science fiction for more than sixty years, I have set out to fulfil a long-held goal: to write science fiction of my own, exploring unusual scenarios of alien contact in the great tradition of Lem, Forward, Clarke, and other writers whose work has been so mind-expanding. I, and many others like me, aspire to their greatness and impact on the genre. My stories are, in many ways, a salute to them.

I publish under both my own name and the pen name Hans Larsen.

What drives my stories →    The masters →

• The Lachlan Trilogy

  An object 419 million years old, a team in the southern tablelands of New South Wales, and the slow construction of a language between two intelligences from different worlds.

• The Murmur Tetralogy

  A forty-three-minute periodic signal arrives at Earth in November 2029. Four novels covering its discovery, decipherment, and consequences across a generation.

• Conversations

  A retired chess prodigy in the Cairngorms becomes humanity's first translator for an intelligence at the L1 Lagrange point.

• Simulation

  A physicist at a Western Australian quantum-detector consortium notices a residual that should not be there — the substrate-level footprint of work being done in another regime, coupled to ours through the shared quantum substrate.