About the Novel

Every 248 years the dwarf planet Pluto slides inside Neptune’s orbit and spends 20 years closer to the sun than the blue ice giant. Since the birth of Christ, these ‘interior’ periods have preceded eras of great turbulence and revolution. The most recent interior just ended…

James Smith is an ambitious government contractor working on a top-secret national surveillance project. When a conspiracy-minded blogger sends him a cryptic email (“Tell me about Pluto”), James and his friend & co-worker Ethan Scott begin an investigation that eventually connects a radical theory of key historical events to their company’s CEO Jack Gordon — the CEO who’s just unexpectedly promoted James to the leadership team of the ever-expanding surveillance project. Soon Ethan disappears and then the country is attacked, and James’s world begins to resemble one dystopia after another — just as predicted by the Pluto theory and the Gordon family’s literary acquaintances.

As the newest revolution begins, the search for Pluto takes James from D.C. to London and deep into history to find the real story, his own story, and the key to the future of the world.

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FUTURE PERFECT is a philosophical dystopian thriller about the effects of stories on reality.

It considers the relationships between (1) personal narratives (i.e. individual reality), (2) community affiliations and cultures that create worldviews and group reality, and (3) “real” reality (the natural world’s story, the tale of an ecosystem, in a language we’ve forgotten). Oh, and (4) — fictional stories that, once they leave an author’s imagination, can take on a life of their own, changing worlds and blowing up conventions.

It’s about stories that come true, stories we think are true, and stories where readers seize control of a narrative and create a new truth.

Stories can destroy worlds; a new story may be the only thing that can save ours.