By Lori DeBoer
I am always excited and happy when my clients have book releases, but the feeling is more like proud auntie or grandma. With the recent release of Shadow Engineer by Addie Rose Press, I feel like a proud book mama.
The book was originally a solo project by Eric Bogatin, a phycisist who is one of the top experts on signal integrity, a specialized field in electrical engineering related to how signals interact in interconnects. He has written seven technical books and lectured around the world. Eric received his BS in Physics from MIT and went on to finish an MS and PhD, also in physics, from the University of Arizona, in Tucson, specializing in cosmology, lasers and quantum optics. His signal integrity web site is www.beTheSignal.com. His personal web site is www.EricBogatin.com.
He self-published the book in 2011 as a pet project and, after getting encouraging results, decided to pair up with me to revise the book from the ground up. It’s the first in the SciQuest Legacy Series and we are already hard at work on the second book in the series.
I was drawn to the project because it satisfies a need for traditional science fiction that incorporates more hard science than fantasy. I had just spent a semester studying the roots of the genre and reading many of the classics, including 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, The Martian Chronicles, Frankenstein and more, for our homeschooling integrated unit on Science Fiction and Physics. My teenage son and I also greatly enjoyed watching the “Physics of the Impossible” series by Michio Kaku. I believed that Shadow Engineer represents an important shift in the field of science fiction and I am proud to be part of that.
One of the other reasons I really like the book is the voice of the main character, Bryan Postman, a self-proclaimed ninjaneer who lives for the technical challenge. It’s interesting to see how he reacts when his next big challenge is threatening the world. His eagerness to embrace all the technological wonders he encounters in SciQuest–a company so advanced that it operates in the shadows–is a joy to watch.
Shadow Engineer is available at Amazon.com as both an e-book and a paperback. I hope you have as much fun reading it as we did writing it.
