Scott A. Bollens

Scott A. Bollens is Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning and Public Policy, University of California, Irvine. Since retirement, he has written four dystopian novels exploring the intersection of society, technology, and human behavior.

MEMORY POOL (2026) Regenerated memory moves from medical breakthrough to mass entertainment, and then to something far more dangerous. Challenges readers to consider how easily experience can be shaped when memory itself becomes manipulable.

PRECIPICE: WHEN ALGORITHMS TRIUMPHED (2024) “One man’s struggle to save his own humanity from the threatening-yet-seductive forces of the machine-world that seeks to control him. It’s a compelling story set in a well-drawn near-future world where the toughest battles are waged inside the protagonist’s own mind.”

REFORM: COMBATING THE ALGORITHMIC MUTATION (2023) "Bollens has crafted a superb fiction that delves into some of the most concerning and potentially frightening realities of our future. A highly inventive, unique dystopia."

RESTART: STORIES OF THE CAIRN AGE (2021) "An intriguing and unsettling read, ReStart portrays a viable future given our current social and political dynamics. Bollens’ use of a faux-anthropological lens will grab you until the end."

BORDERED CITIES AND DIVIDED SOCIETIES: HUMANISTIC ESSAYS OF VIOLENCE, CONFLICT, AND HEALING (2021) is a provocative, moving, and poetic encounter with the hearts and minds of individuals living in nine cities of conflict, violence, and healing—Jerusalem, Belfast, Johannesburg, Nicosia, Sarajevo, Mostar, Barcelona, Bilbao, and Beirut.

TRAJECTORIES OF CONFLICT AND PEACE (2018) includes over 120 interviews based on 2015-2016 research in Jerusalem and Belfast, providing a rare on-the-ground longitudinal analysis of changes in these two cities over a twenty-year period.

CITY AND SOUL is based on 245 interviews in 9 cities of inflammatory nationalistic conflict, research undertaken over 17 year time span, personal narrative, and scholarly insight.