In July of 2049, Dr. Thomas McKinsey and a small band of scientists rebelled against the recently installed Congress-in-Council and declared the moon a republic. Six months later, McKinsey's followers were dead and he was dying. With the world below him entering a prolonged global struggle, McKinsey programmed the computers of Tranquility to continue his strategic vision, a plan to establish world unity even at a terrible cost. As an afterthought, he instructed the machines to raise the colony's only surviving resident, a baby named Grey Waters destined to grow up on an abandoned moon base with computers as his only companions.Now it's the year 2069, and once again humans venture to the moon, uninvited and unwelcome. Led by the widow of the long deceased Thomas McKinsey, each of the five crew members have a claim on Tranquility's past. Particularly interesting to Grey is Captain Kris Fairfield, a war hero haunted by her war time experiences. As the computers plan to eliminate this new threat to their authority, Grey has an agenda of his own, initiating a civil war. While the newcomers stumble through the middle of a situation they don't understand, Grey pushes the rebellion to an ultimate confrontation for control of the moon, and possibly the future of Earth as well.
After a brief career in yellow journalism for a political machine, I started writing science fiction. I've always enjoyed the old-time writers from science fiction's golden age, though most of my current reading is confined to history and biography. The premise of a child raised under unusual circumstances seemed especially interesting, for it examines what makes us what we are. Kipling did this in Jungle Book, as Edgar Rice Burroughs did in Tarzan and Jean Auel in Clan of the Cave Bear. The Waters of the Moon series, (aka the Tranquility books), seeks to discover how a child raised by comupters against the back-drop of war might struggle to achieve a normal life.
The 9th and final Tranquility book is being released in 2010, called Tranquility's Last Stand. Two new books, Slave of Akrona and Magistrate of the Dark Land, will be available to Kindle readers this summer and can be found in print by the end of the year. More information can be found at watersofthemoon.com
I was born in the Yankee-occupied San Fernando Valley in tbe once-great State of California. My father, Roy Urbach, worked as a film editor at Warner Brothers, and he helped give me a strong sense of story-telling. I attended school at California State University Northridge but learned creative writing at Los Angeles Valley College several years later. I am married to the paper doll artist Kwei-lin Lum.
