Till Human Voices Wake Us is my fourth novel, published by Bantam Spectra in July, 2007.

Like the title implies, this book is about waking up – discovering who we were, who we are, and finally who we want to be. That's not always easy, especially if you happen to have lost part of your self in an accident, or are losing yourself to an incurable disease. Where do you go for help? Who do you go to? What life do you choose, and what one(s) do you let go of? If our main task in life is to give birth to ourself, which past leads to a future worth living and which one is a psychological or spiritual dead-end?

Idolon is my third novel by Bantam Spectra, published in July, 2006. Like Clade, it was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award.

The book is departure from the biopunk future of Clade and Crache, and uses programmable matter to explore the affect of image on identity in a mass-mediated society. Electronic skin – a membrane woven out of nanoscopic semiconducting threads – makes it possible for anybody to digitally "philm" himself or herself to look like someone else. This is done by downloading images from movies, video games, or any other digitized media. It's a world where people can be anyone they want to be, where they pray that the change is more than skin deep, where they philm themselves to be part of a certain "cast," and where appearance says as much about who they are as what they are.

Crache is my second novel, published by Bantam Spectra in November, 2004. The book is a stand-alone sequel to Clade, and attempts to build on the idea of clades by exploring a world where biological information (such as DNA and designer drugs) can be digitized, electronically transmitted, and downloaded into people. The transmission and exchange of “biodigital” information makes it possible to electronically control the biochemistry of individuals, groups, and entire populations. Another thing I wanted to examine was the viral, recombinant nature of mass-mediated images. Set on Earth and in the Kuiper belt, the book focuses on three people – Rexx, Fola, and L. Mariachi – who are either running or hiding from the past. Each is searching for a way to start over. Eventually, their paths intersect, brought together by a disaster that threatens to restructure reality.

Clade is my first novel, published by Bantam Spectra in December, 2003. It won the second annual Norton Award, was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award, and a nominee for the Alaska Association of School Librarians Puffin Award. A large part of the book was written while I was living in Watsonville, California. Like many of the farming towns along the California Central Coast, Watsonville has a long history of labor conflict, migrant workers, and immigrants (legal and illegal). Immigrant populations, especially illegal ones, tend to be insular. Out of fear or prejudice, the people that make them up keep to themselves. To a large degree illegal aliens remain physically and psychologically isolated from the general population. They live in self-contained communities where they can easily maintain their own language, ethics, and cultural traditions. They don’t need to integrate, and often don’t want to. This was the idea behind the clades and pherions (viral pheromones). What, I wondered, would the world look like if the divisions between people were biochemically mediated and enforced, to the point where certain populations and segments of society could be physically separated and prevented from interacting? Clade was my attempt to use science as a metaphor to explore segregation along cultural, social, religious, and economic lines. I was particularly interested in this question on the level of everyday life. How would this technology affect the lives of the poorest segments of the population? The main character, Rigo, isn’t illegal, but he’s on the lower end of the economic scale. Like everyone, he wants a better life for himself, and has to figure out how to do that within the constraints imposed on him by the clade social order.