Am I human?

Am I human?

The first line of my debut novel poses what should be a question with an obvious answer. As a gay, INFJ man who grew up in his cognitive shadow-stack, it’s a question I wrestled with for most of my life. It’s a question that drove me to write and to write the story than unfolds in Star Horizon. It’s a question that sets the emotional journey of the protagonist, and mirrors my own.

As a child, I felt strange and different. As a result, at an early age, I pondered the state of my humanity. As I grew older, and realized I was gay, the sense of alienation deepened. Being gay, I was taught, meant an eternity of damnation. Being gay meant I wasn’t loved by God. For me, the idea that I was fully human was never a given. INFJs, the smallest of group in the Briggs-Meyers personality spectrum, also meant I was different and very aware of that.

The great divide in Star Horizon is between those humans who have been engineered and those who have not—the natural born. The latter are divine, and the former are deemed manmade, subset humans akin to a commodity. For a culture wary of over dependence on AI, this form of slavery was embraced, and prompted the flowering of empire at the cost of dehumanizing oppression. 

The protagonist, a member of a subset group, embarks on a journey to discover his humanity. He must forgive himself and those who hurt him, and he must fight and risk his life to claim what for others is a given. As a bona fide Star Wars, Star Trek, Babylon 5, Farscape, Lord of the Rings nerd, I couldn’t help but want to tell the story in a big setting stretching across the Milky Way.  

When I’m not working, writing, exercising, or going to my Mankind Project support group, I nurture gardens that host butterflies and bees. And I’m a total YouTube junkie. Life is a challenge and life is a journey.

The novel is dedicated to Tony Pryor, my beloved partner and husband of 23 years, who died suddenly in April 2023.