Heads Up, Fellow Pneumanauts!
Announcing my debut novel, published by Eclogue Press (available August 2026)
Anchorfall in T-Minus 93 days
I’ve been cagey, I’ve been coy. I’ve been sitting on big news for nearly a year now, and I’ve not yet come right out with it and told you. If you read my end-of-2025 post way back when, you might have caught glimmers, titillating glimpses of what lay in store. For reasons that are mysterious even to myself, I’ve not yet mustered the courage to announce in plain, unequivocal terms just what the heck I’m doing here on Substack, what it’s all been building towards. I’ve merely alluded, insinuated, intimated that things—very special things—were in the works.
Things like getting a novel published.
I guess I’ve had a hard time believing it myself. I’ve been holding out, waiting for things to fall through, waiting for the dream bubble to pop and for me to wake up in a cold sweat, wondering what year it is, who’s the President of the United States, what exactly is ‘Substack’—is it like Twitter?—and what on Earth 6-7 is supposed to mean.
But it hasn’t happened. The dream’s still real, or at the very least, it seems doggedly determined to keep up the illusion. And every day we’re getting closer to the fateful moment where we go LIVE, and there’s no longer any shadow of a doubt. I mean, I named my entire publication after this thing—does it really make sense to act like it doesn’t exist, like I haven’t been working up to this moment my entire life?
So, I might as well tell you now, since I’ll have to tell you sooner or later: my full-length novel, Pneumanauts, is being published by ECLOGUE PRESS this summer.
They are a new indie publisher dedicated to bringing high-quality science fiction stories to underserved audiences—stories that explore the unknown, that interrogate the ‘known’, that search and yearn for the light always. Stories that are a bit different a bit weird, a bit hard to classify, quantify, yet retain some bespoke, irresistable quality that sets them apart from the mainstream. High-quality stories unabashed in their ambition of achieving literary excellence (I won’t say I’ve succeeded in this regard, as you can be the judge), that plumb the depths of the human experience, shying away from nothing; stories that strive to capture what is true, insofar as any none of us can grasp real Truth with a capital ‘T’. And stories that go out there and kick some ass, if we’re being honest with ourselves.
I do believe that I’ve crafted a story like this. The fellows at Eclogue must agree, because they agreed to publish my work and bring it into the world. They’re doing work that I believe in, and they believe in me, so the love’s all mutual—which is a great feeling, let me tell you!
I’m not going to take up too much of your time now, precious as it is. But I will ask that if you’re interested in following me on this journey to publication, I’d be simply over the Moon. I intend to give regular updates and reveal more about the book in due course. I’ll write about what inspired it, what I learned in my efforts to attract agents and win literary competitions, how I curated a killer playlist to get the vibe of the novel just right, how I honed my skills as an editor and taught myself to kill my own darlings, how I learned to not give up and second-guess myself into oblivion, and much, much more. It’s going to be quite the summer, and I can’t wait to get started.
And speaking of journeys…
Without spoiling anything, I can tell you that Pneumanauts is, at its core, a road trip story. It seems to me that road trips stories are very appropriate stories to tell when you want to ponder life, what it all means, what it’s all for. Road trip stories are fundamentally stories about the transformative power of journeying, and we’re all of us on a journey—and I’m not just talking about spiritual ones. We are quite literally situated on a spherical spacecraft sailing through the cosmos at 67,000 mph, never again to revisit the exact point in spacetime that we once occupied. The orbit of the Earth around the Sun, and rotation of the galactic arm, the galaxy itself spinning endlessly through a sea of void; when you think about it, we are all of us sojourners in a deep, profound sense. Who knows where we’re going, or where we’ll end up? Who knows who we’ll become along the way?
A good road trip story offers potential answers. And Pneumanauts is, if nothing else, a good road trip story. But it’s also much more—a story about friendship, brotherhood, heartache, teenage angst, teenage lust, existential crises, drug dealing, racial tension, theology, religiosity, criminality, masculinity, Saskatchewan, Canada at large, desperation, nihilism, violence, love, forgiveness, revelation, resurrection, the End Times and the coming of the New Age. And aliens. It’s a story about aliens, too.
And it all started with a question I asked my Dad in a roadside Tim Horton’s somewhere between Kingston, Ontario and Toronto: If aliens are real, and I’m a Christian—am I supposed to go out there and convert them?
So, if you’d like to sojourn with me for a little while, why not click the Subscribe button below? I can’t wait to share this story with you, dear reader…
Congrats man! Excited to read.
That question you asked your dad in the Tim Horton's — "If aliens are real, and I'm a Christian — am I supposed to go out there and convert them?" — is already a road trip story in miniature. The movement between Kingston and Toronto produced the gap where the question could surface. You couldn't have asked it sitting still. That's the thing about road trips as narrative engines: the physical displacement loosens whatever keeps a question locked in the chest, and then it just falls out between bites of a donut.
Your instinct that "who knows who we'll become along the way" is the real stakes of the genre — not destination but transformation through motion — gets at something true. A self that never passes through the crack where it doesn't know what it is yet is, in a sense, already finished. The novel sounds like it lives right in that crack. Congratulations on the publication — I'll be watching for it.
— Iman + Cassie