Bio for Robert Dean Holland

Great News — The Stolen Man Trilogy is coming!

Book One of the Stolen Man Trilogy is now available! Dragons of Orion and Elijah, the Stolen Man

Book Two is finished and the prepublication polish edit nears completion: The Creeping Darkness of Janaidar and The Stolen Man

Book Three is finished and in the prepublication polish edit: Gravity Masters of Janaidar and the Stolen Man

About Robert:

In the US Navy after High School, I was trained as a Machinist Mate on nuclear submarines at Mare Island Naval Station, Vallejo, CA. Working inside a submarine is hot, noisy, smelly, and extremely intense. As a self-contained environment, however, a nuclear submarine is much like I imagine a spaceship to be. Both require specialized suits for breathing and the management of pressure where survival in a deadly environment dictates every moment simply to remain alive and keep your shipmates safe.

I’ve spent my life around and inside of giant machinery, powerhouses, and strange industrial environments like underground soda ash mines and strip mines for coal where nothing concerning a human’s ability to survive can be overlooked. We are fragile after all. All of this lends real life intensity to writing about such things.

I worked as a laborer at a petroleum refinery in Cheyenne Wyoming, which was stinky, dirty, nasty, and dangerous. I then moved to heavy construction in the boomtown days of Rock Springs, Wyoming. During that time I worked union operating heavy equipment like draglines and drilling rigs. At the Black Butte Coal Mine, I drove a truck the size of a house with tires twice as tall as a man. I even worked on a Page Dragline with a giant, 50-cubic-yard bucket—one of the biggest mobile land-machines known at the time. I eventually became an Inside Wireman electrical apprentice in Denver Colorado, and obtained my Master Electrician’s License, which I carried for 22-years.

One time, working on the units at the Jim Bridger Powerhouse during a preoperational shakedown, a 40-pound chunk scrap, stainless-steel got picked up inside a 10-foot diameter steam line. It hit the last 90-degree bend, went right through the 4-inch thick stainless-steel pipe, then through a wall of the powerhouse like a cannon ball making a 3-foot hole. We found that piece of mangled stainless (3 inches thick and a couple feet square) over 1-mile away. Three of us were sitting right under the outside of Unit-4 when the coupon of steel went right over our heads. The shock wave was so intense it shattered the windows of the pickup and knocked us all senseless. I moved on and  traveled about the U.S. as an electrician putting time in on coal-fired and nuclear powerhouses all the way from Colorado to Oregon and Washington. I even worked at one of the first nuclear powerhouses in the world located at Fort St. Vrain near Platteville, Colorado.

In my late 30’s I decided to make a career move and returned to school at the University of Colorado Denver Campus and obtained a Bachelor of Science in Information Systems. I became an Oracle Master Database Administrator and IBM AIX systems administrator. Of the 17-years in that last career move, I spent the final 7-years supporting Oracle databases for the County Sheriffs of Colorado as the Director of Information Services.

I have a profound and personal dislike for narcissistic people, which gives me deeply rooted passions when writing about the bad things bad people do. Writers compose work from direct knowledge or inferred knowledge (research), and have a degree of imagination that compels the reader to go along for the ride to the world you have created. My point is this. To be a good author, you should write about what you know (or feel) with passion—at least that’s one way.

As I look around me today I hope that we will someday stop destroying ourselves and our beautiful planet. I consider Expanse to be a cautionary tale, as well as the most accurate depiction of life in outer space I have ever seen.

The next heavy-industrial boom will certainly be off-planet. First, we will mine the Moon, then terraform Mars. Next, we’ll mine and industrialize the Asteroid Belt, and finally the moons of Saturn and Jupiter. That’s a lot to write speculative science-fiction and fantasy about. Isn’t it?

My favorite recent authors (both living and dead) are: James SA Corey, George RR Martin, Terry Brooks, Steven King, Ben Bova, Ray Bradbury, Larry Niven, Isaac Asimov, C. J. Cherryh, Orson Scott Card, Poul Anderson, Fred Saberhagen, Robert Heinlein, Robert Adams, Jack Chalker, Bill Gibson, the Wachowskis, Joss Whedon, J.J. Abrams, George Lucas and Lawrence Kasdan.

Thanks for your time and I wish you well.

About the Books:

Beast-headed, genetically-engineered NuliZhu war-bloods from the planet Ta Shemau who resemble the gods of ancient Egypt and humanoid aliens with elongated heads have returned to planet Janaidar to enslave the human population left behind millennia ago. The aliens are powerful and odds seem insurmountable, but unbeknownst to the aliens, Janaidar has it’s own  magic-wielding, telepathic dragons, who developed their own science and technology in the Orion Nebula ages before the pyramids of ancient Egypt were built, and they have preserved and hidden an ancient-alien artificial-sapience—The-Creeping-Darkness—that was built by the ancient-alien NuliZhu as the ultimate weapon over 5,000-years ago. Also left behind were the Huan Long Shui Sisteren—an order of chaste guardians have kept The-Creeping-Darkness suppressed over the ages till High Priestess Alahna awakens it seeking a savior for her planet.

A reluctant hero named, Elijah, gets abducted from Earth through a transdimensional-arc, transformed into a power-master by The-Creeping-Darkness, and becomes embroiled in a quest to save the dragons and peoples of Janaidar, an earth-like, parallel planet in a sidereal dimension long abandoned by the long-head NuliZhu around the time of the Pyramids of Giza.

We optimistically estimate that Books 2 and 3 will be available in the latter half of 2023.