Climate fiction without apocalypse, set in and around Washington, D.C. Newly minted engineering professor Jake Harper, dealing with issues of mild dyslexia and awkwardness with public speaking, wants to stave off climate weirding by re-engineering the North American electric grids. His pregnant partner Abbey London, sassy but irresistible, starts her practice as an infectious disease specialist, concerned with encroaching tropical diseases. Together they operate her parents' Dragonfly Inn just twenty minutes away in northern Virginia. A chance encounter at a lecture at George Washington University causes Jake to become suspicious that someone may be plotting a cyberattack on critical electrical infrastructure. Abbey discovers an infection new to North America has infiltrated the drug-injecting population in the Capital, and she must personally and professionally rise to the challenge.
Born in Minnesota, I grew up in Missouri, then at eighteen realized my California dream with undergraduate years at Stanford, including two years on the tennis team. After med school back in my home state, I completed a residency at UC San Francisco, where I gave my first pub-lic lecture, a talk on nuclear power. Two weeks later I started teaching full time in a UC Davis-affiliated family medicine residency, with much of my practice focused on obstetrics but also HIV care starting in early 1983. I taught full time for sixteen years, with my main academic ap-pointment at UC Davis, but coming full circle, a community faculty appointment at Stanford Med Center as well, since I taught a number of their PA students.I lost my heart in San Francisco. My wife became a certified nurse-midwife, and between the two of us we delivered thousands of babies and had three of our own, all graduated and married-two of them with a couple of grandsons apiece. We moved up to Bellingham more than a quarter century ago, but are now both retired. In the last ten years I have continued to lecture widely, including several seminar se-ries at Western Washington University, plus many other venues, in-cluding a couple of out-of-state conferences. But I no longer teach medicine, rather, I teach about energy systems, the climate system, epi-demiology, and the electric grid, and this set of fourteen or so lectures form the basis for many of the chapters in my book.Our biggest climate-related trip was in Europe in 2015, which in-cluded biking in Berlin, Copenhagen, and Oslo, then a two-week cruise from Svalbard to Greenland and Iceland. We accomplished hiking, kayaking, and a true polar plunge well north of the Arctic Circle while in Greenland. Additionally, we explored some of the eastern Canadian maritime islands in 2023. In the next twenty months we plan to visit and investigate the electric grids of Kauai and Puerto Rico.
