I write science fiction for people who like competent characters, lived-in machinery, and moral clarity without the sermon. Think Heinlein with the serial numbers filed off, a touch of Firefly, and a working knowledge of how institutions actually run.

Thirty-five years in federal IT taught me how large systems break and how the people inside them cope. I put that on the page. Now retired, I write full time under the Merovex Press imprint.

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Military science fiction. The mail must move, even when the empire is coming apart. Four books, available now.

Space opera in a space-western register. A drifter-procedural set in the Postal Marines universe, further down the timeline. In progress. Newsletter subscribers hear first.

Colonial alternate history. Four books, available now. If you like your speculative fiction grounded in the texture of a real founding era, start here.

New to my work? Grab a free reader magnet and see if we get along. join the newsletter. I send occasional dispatches on new releases, the worlds behind the books, and the tools I build to write them. No spam, easy unsubscribe.

If you found your way here because you build things, welcome. I do too.

I draft, version, and ship my books the way I used to ship software: from the command line, in plain text, under source control. I am building Verkilo, a desktop writing application (Tauri + Rails, with MCP integration) for authors who want their manuscript treated like a real project instead of a word-processor blob.

A few early articles on writing as a developer:

• Cleaning My Closet
• Writing on GitHub: Organizing the Book
• Writing on GitHub: Organizing the Series
• Introducing Korektu
• Automating Scrivener: Wordcount Log
• Automating Scrivener: GitHub Commit
• Working With Your Beta Readers on GitHub

More as I write them. Stack is Ruby, Rails, a little Rust, and a standing refusal to touch React.

• Website and full catalog: merovex.press
• Newsletter: newsletter

Retired in Raleigh, North Carolina. Lives with his wife Cathy, three of four kids and two Maine Coon cats who run the household.