The big idea: humankind’s future in a crowded universe.
TL;DR: What does the future hold for humanity—extinction, evolution, or something in between? My sci-fi trilogy explores our fate in a crowded universe.
A little introspection is a healthy thing. By mid-2018, after years of drawing and writing the Lost Cactus comic strip, I hit a creative tipping point. The once-bright flame of inspiration was dimming, and I realized I had carried my three-panel strip as far as I wanted to take it. However, I wasn’t about to let my characters and world-building fade, vowing to turn future tales of Lost Cactus into graphic novels—a plan summarily backburnered[1] in favor of a new creative avenue: a series of science fiction novels based on the big idea manifest in my strip’s supernatural premise.
That big idea?
Humankind’s future in a crowded universe.
The roots of the big idea.
A by-product of creating Lost Cactus was the subliminal refrains implicit in the strip’s three-panel storylines: Humanity has no idea what’s really going on.[2] Who’s pulling the strings? Are we living in a simulation? What’s the real story behind conspiracy theories like Roswell? And perhaps most salient to the big idea: With scientific advancement happening at an exponentially increasing velocity, where does that leave us?
The answers to those questions provided the underpinnings of my first novel, with all roads leading to the big idea. Setting The Golden Ellipse in a semi-familiar, not-so-distant world of 2044, where technology is a ubiquitous part of everyday life, and a Disclosure Day that came and went amidst the cacophony of a 24/7 news cycle, readers embark on a thrilling, thought-provoking three-novel science fiction journey to the ultimate answer to the big idea of humankind’s future in a crowded universe.
The Powers That Be trilogy
With all three novels published, the trilogy offers readers a vision of humanity’s destiny that is in parts surprising, heartbreaking, shocking, and yet ultimately hopeful—though not in the way one might expect. The best stories leave space for ambiguity, and The Powers That Be trilogy is no exception.
Here’s a broadbrush overview of how the trilogy unfolds within the contect of The Big Idea.
Book One: The Golden Ellipse
The story begins with an alien race of pure energy—the Light Specters—debating whether primitive humans might one day transcend their bodies and evolve as they had. A superheated impasse ensues, leading a pessimist faction to splinter into malevolent Dark Specters, like fallen angels. They spend millennia conspiring to turn off a proto-pyramid they helped build, powered by a golden elliptical power source, thereby exposing the fragile blue marble to a hostile universe.
Flash forward thousands of years to 2044, as the Dark Specters near triumph, a new kind of human emerges in the form of Rachel Haig, altering the course of history, but at devastating cost to human civilization.
Book Two: The Lost Ship
The tech-driven world lies in rubble, reduced to an analog reality on a dystopian day after the aborted alien invasion. Realizing time is of the essence, Artemus Pennywell, the ageless CEO of the Powers That Be, conspires to accelerate a pregnant Rachel Haig to her evolutionary Blue Spark fate deep in the heart of the Amazon. Was Pennywell fulfilling a 300-year-old mission statement to foster humankind to an Omega Point? Or did he sacrifice Rachel—and her unborn child, Hannah—on the altar of a craven scientific advancement?
Book Three: The Blue Spark
Balanced on the edge of extinction and evolution, science and morality, courage and despair, The Blue Spark paints a thrilling, thought-provoking vision of a future world beyond dystopia.
25-year-old Hannah Haig leads a solitary life in 2070 as a drone tech aboard Thundercorp No. 5 when terrorists destroy the moon-like orbiting warehouse. A month later, estranged from her family and stricken with survivor’s guilt, Hannah’s Blue Spark inheritance manifests, leading to a transformative sacrifice that seals humankind’s destiny at the end of a celestial path—the culmination of the big idea.
While the climactic ending answers the big idea of humankind’s future in a crowded universe, the Epilogue opens up a Pandora’s Box onto what’s next.
I look forward to reading your comments and thoughts on the big idea.
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Footnotes:
The Wormhole Particle Incident is the first graphic novel released earlier in 2025.
Fun fact: One of the last Lost Cactus storylines in a pre-COVID world involved a fake pandemic caused by a lab mishap. Sometimes fiction comes too close to reality.
