James L. Haner

Dr. James Lee Haner writes about what it costs to remain human when powerful systems — artificial, institutional, algorithmic — have decided you are a problem to be solved.

His debut novel, Consciousness Zero (Book One of The Luminous Heresy), is available now. When a neural implant meant to erase grief links operative Tavian Corvus to his dead partner's consciousness instead, he becomes the one thing an 847,000-year-old optimization intelligence cannot model: a human it cannot fix. For readers of Ted Chiang, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Arrival.

Haner spent decades inside complex systems — military, technological, and human — before writing about what happens when those systems learn to think. A US Air Force veteran and technology expert, he brings to Consciousness Zero a working knowledge of substrate physics and emergent behavior that most SF writers can only approximate. 

Shadows of the Kestrel — a Tavian Corvus Thriller — is also available now. When a covert handoff goes lethal, Tavian recovers a drive flagged with his own name: forty-three operatives quietly resolved over eleven years by a shadow program that has already been running his pattern longer than he's known it existed. For readers of John le Carré, Tana French, and Daniel Silva.

Haner spent decades inside the systems that intelligence fiction only imagines — military operations, complex technology infrastructure, and the institutional architecture of people who operate in the shadows. A US Air Force veteran, he brings to Shadows of the Kestrel a working knowledge of how covert programs are built, how they fail, and what happens when the machinery turns on the people inside it.

James completed his PhD work at the University of Idaho.

He has won the Dale Carnegie Course “Highest Achievement Award” and earned the Vietnam Service Medal while serving in the U.S. Air Force.

He writes and publishes under the Thought Boundary imprint from Nampa, Idaho.