James Hill saw the theft of the British Crown Jewels live on CNN and had an uneasy suspicion that his father had invented teleportation. Nothing less could explain the theft and it made sense of his brilliant father's secretive new job. Bob Hill knew his discovery was likely to cause global disruption, and it was a development that couldn't be hidden away for long. To goad the nations into quickly finding ways to protect themselves, he'd decided to play-act a supervillian, right out of a James Bond movie, a self-proclaimed "Emperor of Earth" holding the world hostage. And the nations did react, finding a way to poison him in his secret hideaway inside Mt. Rushmore. But no one counted on James hacking his way into the family computer and giving himself access to the technology. With Mom and Oriel Meirieu, the beautiful girl he'd met while popping over to visit Paris, they evade the FBI, INTERPOL and even black-ops agents, saving Bob's life and facing the question: What exactly is a legal claim to power?
Henry Melton travels half the year in a satellite Internet equiped RV with his wife Mary Ann, a nature photographer. A jagged path has taken them to dozens of science fiction conventions and even more National Wildlife Refuges. His writing office is often a laptop perched on the Jeep's steering wheel as she tracks down the rare and the beautiful beside some secluded dirt road.
From the Redwood forests to Death Valley to the Great Lakes to Delaware swamps to the African bush, scenes out the windshield become locales for his fiction work. Check his website, HenryMelton.com for current location, a blog of his activities, and scheduled appearances. Many years of travel stories are archived on-line.
Formerly a programmer specializing in database work and web design, he pioneered Internet use for a Fortune 500 company until the tech bubble collapse. In the early days of home computers, he created one of the earliest commercial word processing programs.
Henry's short fiction has been published in magazines and anthologies, most frequently in ANALOG. "Catacomb", published in DRAGON magazine, is considered a classic, and by the continuing fan mail twenty years later, a formative influence among modern computer gaming programmers.
Other than an occasional short story, most of his time is spent writing science fiction YA novels. Currently being published by Wire Rim Books are the Small Towns, Big Ideas series of science fiction. "Emperor Dad", the first of the books, won the 2008 Darrell Award for Best Midsouth Novel. "Lighter Than Air" won the 2009 Eleanor Cameron Award (Golden Duck Award) for Middle Grade Science Fiction.
