In Times to Come Series
Displaced is the first book in my new In Times to Come Series, launched in April 2022. Like my previous post-apocalyptic and dystopian works, this is a story of survival action and adventure in a setting where technology has failed or has been disrupted and law and order have collapsed. The main difference is that in this story the central protagonist is also lost in time, arriving by accident in a near-future America he couldn’t have imagined when he set out for a hike in 2012.
The In Times to Come series begins in New Mexico’s Gila Wilderness, a place I have explored many times over the years and continue to find myself drawn to as often as I can get there. The Gila is truly a vast roadless wilderness with rugged mountains, seldom visited canyons and countless remote caves and caverns. The idea for this story came from my own discovery of forgotten artifacts and relics in one of those hidden caves, and as the series progresses, I intend to write a nonfiction account of that particular backpacking trip for those who are interested.
The Time Travel genre has always been one of my favorites, especially when it is mixed with exploration, survival and raw backcountry adventure. The works of Edgar Rice Burroughs in particular held my fascination as a young reader, and no doubt inspired many of the adventures I undertook in the islands, jungles and mountains when I was old enough to set out on my own.
The second and third episodes of the In Times to Come series are planned for later this year, with Book Two: Destiny scheduled for release in October.
Book One: DISPLACED
A glitch in time and a one-way trip…
Back from his final deployment with the U.S. Marines, Alan Carson is hiking across New Mexico’s Gila Wilderness to ponder his future and put the war in his past.
When his best friend and squad leader, Sergeant Kurt Timms, took a Taliban bullet because of bad intel, Alan made a promise to his dying friend. He would come here to see the rugged mountains that were Kurt’s boyhood stomping grounds, even if the horseback hunting trip the two of them had planned would never come to pass.
After paying his respects to Kurt’s wife and daughter at the ranch his buddy had called home, Alan loads his pack for a week and heads into the Gila, finding all the splendor and solitude of which Kurt so often raved. But deep in a trackless canyon, miles from any trail, Alan finds something else: The body of a dead man at the foot of a cliff… an ancient cave dwelling in the rock face above… and a mysterious passageway too intriguing to ignore.
Alan Carson has come to the West to contemplate the next chapter of his life, but the future into which he emerges is beyond imagination; and the world he’d known before is changed beyond recognition. Can he ever come to grips with this new reality he must face? Can he ever return to the life he knows and understands?
Displaced is Book One of the Times to Come Series: a story of survival and courage in a near-future dystopian nightmare.
Book Two: DESTINY
Trapped in a future where everything has changed…
In Book One of In Times to Come, Alan Carson passes through a glitch in time that rips him right out of 2012, the year he has returned from his final deployment with the Marine Corps in the ongoing war in Afghanistan.
Alone in the remote wilderness and ranch country of southwestern New Mexico and cut off from the life he knew before, Alan learns that it is now 2029 and that the nation he served has fallen into collapse.
Alan’s only connection to the life he knew before is the daughter of his former squad leader, killed in action back in April 2012. Alan knows he can trust her with his story, but will Sierra and Alan find a way to wind back the 17 years he’s lost? Or will they find something else; something far more unexpected?