About the Book
Davin is good at math and science, inconsequential to his military family, where his older brother will soon become commander of the Army of the Republic. His father once conquered the southern land—and now his youngest son has flunked out of Academy, a complete failure as a cadet. But something else is going on in Davin’s life. Why does he sometimes have visions and dreams of terrible events, war, and strange, exotic and deadly creatures? After returning home, a Hellport opens nearby, spilling out monsters that kill and maim—and he had a premonition of the event! He is tested for a Gift, the ability to control God’s own Power, and the result is terrifying. He begins a quest to find answers to his many questions. Before he finds them, he will face more Hellport monsters, overcome an army, and find a new home among mountain tribes who will help him discover his destiny.
About the Author :
Nathan Dodge grew up in Dallas, Texas, attending local schools. After winning a scholarship from Bell Helicopter, he attended Southern Methodist University, receiving a BSEE degree, magna cum laude. After nearly two years at Bell, working as a flight test instrumentation engineer, he took a leave of absence after receiving an NSF traineeship, entering The University of Texas to pursue advanced electrical engineering degrees. He received MSEE and Ph.D.EE degrees, graduating cum laude. Nathan was employed by General Dynamics (now Lockheed) in Fort Worth, leaving GD to join Texas Instruments. He spent over two decades at TI, until taking early retirement to join the faculty of The University of Texas at Dallas, where he taught electrical engineering courses (mainly computer-systems-related) until retiring from UTD in 2020. He is married to Faye Lynn King, Ph.D., herself a long-time professor of Social Science in Dallas. She is Nathan’s copy editor, specializing in grammar and preventing the author from his most frequent bad habit of using too many commas. He has three daughters, the youngest of which, Sharon, is also an author, and five grandchildren. Nathan began writing seriously in 2012 and has attended nine Superstars Writing Seminars. He has a story in the Purple Unicorn Anthology with daughter Sharon, a short story sale to Mike Resnick’s Galaxy’s Edge, and a story in Eric Flint’s Grantville Gazette, but he is primarily a novelist. The five-novel Shadow Warriors series, a young adult series about teenagers abducted and forced to fight in a galactic war, was his first novel sale, to Kevin J. Anderson’s WordFire Press. A later three-novel series covers further Shadow Warrior adventures, this time with a new five-person crew. He also wrote The Freedom Conspiracy, a YASF novel about two teenagers who live on the moon and their adventures attempting to find the kidnapped father of one of them. Nathan sold seven novels to Eric Flint’s Ring of Fire Press, including the Portals trilogy, a dystopian novel of future Earth, the Subway trilogy, about a method of transport between planets by wormhole, and the stand-alone novel, I, One (soon to be re-released as AI, One by Top of the World Publishers, under the Novus Mundi imprint). With the death of dear friend and publisher Eric Flint, Nathan’s new novel series, starting with The Bureau, will be published by Novus Mundi as well. Two novels in the series are complete, and he hopes to have another this year and three more in 2024. He is looking forward to a new and mutually beneficial relation with Top of the World. He and daughter Sharon also self-published an anthology of SF short stories, To the Stars, some years ago. Nathan’s background is in computer engineering, and among others, he taught one sophomore course in digital circuits, assembly language programming, and fundamentals of computer architecture at UTD for 21 years. His teaching awards include two as Best Teacher in electrical and computer engineering and a top university-wide teaching citation. In his “spare” time, he loves weightlifting, hiking in Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado, and solving crossword puzzles with wife Faye Lynn.
