I’m also a binge reader — I find an author I like and read everything they’ve ever written! I love science fiction. I have consumed voraciously thousands of books (some are neatly shelved in alphabetical order and some lie completely disorganized in piles on the stairs — my children now read science fiction too and it’s more difficult to keep things in place). I wrote my first story when I was about eight — I got hooked on a book series about an orphan boy who traveled the world with his uncle collecting animals for zoos. Unfortunately, only the first three books were translated into Russian. So I wrote what happened next (I didn’t have a choice, truly).
I didn’t really learn to write until graduate school. My husband and I ran a collaborative creative fiction writing project together — one of the first works of entertainment on the Internet. We started in 1995. People from all over the world submitted stories that wove a single narrative tapestry. We wrote and edited and illustrated and put things up in hours. It was insane! Some of the storylines are amazing. It was a grand experiment that lasted several years and won many awards and totally exhausted us. For those interested, you can still find it at The Company Therapist Project.
In 2015, I finally released my first three science fiction books. I feel like have many worlds in my mind. Each story I read adds more or reveals another, if I write it. Well, that’s about it for now. I hope to meet some of you over the years to come. Please read, please write!
Suddenly, Paris
by Olga and Christopher Werby
Julie Vorov thought her job was to do well in high school and stay out of trouble. She also thought her biggest problem was betraying her best friend by hooking-up with a traitorous boyfriend. But in a world where being human is just a matter of programming, everything changes.
Suddenly, Julie finds herself allied with a scrappy group of alien scientists whose own world has already been destroyed. Together, they mount a clandestine effort to stop the Earth from also being eradicated. And Julie discovers that she’s the pivotal instability—the tipping point—in the plans of another group of aliens bent on invasion.
As Julie battles to save everything she cares about, she uncovers secrets about her own origins that shatter the core of her beliefs. And she falls so deeply in love that the most extreme obstacles posed by loyalty, age, gender, species, and parents will have to be overcome.
Your heart always recognizes the one you love.
You can buy “Suddenly, Paris” on Amazon (and other places).
You can Read the first 2 Chapters here.
“Suddenly, Paris” was placed on the Long List for The James Tiptree Jr. Awards in 2016.
In 2024, “Suddenly, Paris” won the Golden Wizard Award.
Coding Peter
by Olga and Christopher Werby
Knowing that the world is a simulation doesn’t diminish the will to live. Even when the body is made from ones and zeros, the soul doesn’t feel any less real.
In Coding Peter, the sequel to Suddenly, Paris, we learn more about the aliens who have altered the lives of the Vorov family. The URTs are a small band of scientists—the only survivors of a world simulation that no longer exists—who seek only to settle down quietly and unobtrusively in a new home. But contact with humans has led to accidents, misunderstandings, and deaths. A hundred years later, only a few of the alien refugees survive.
Now Julie Orlov’s brother, ten-year-old Peter, is asked to take on the soul of a dying alien—for the good of his family, his alien ancestors, and the Earth itself. In doing so he will become more—but also, maybe less—than himself. It’s a lot to ask of a young boy, especially when the exact consequences to Peter are unknown, even by the aliens themselves.
What Peter decides will change the fate of two civilizations—and maybe more…
You can buy “Coding Peter” on Amazon (and other places) here.
You can Read the first 2 Chapters here.
Pigeon
by Olga Werby
Pigeon is eleven, homeless, and now an orphan. Alone and scared, he seeks to find a new family. But the past he barely remembers comes back to haunt him, endangering his newly-found friends, the Kikkert Family. Fortunately, the Kikkerts want to adopt Pigeon even if he is wanted by strange para-military DNA warriors. As they race through San Francisco to save each other, the true nature of Pigeon’s birth is revealed as well as the secret identity of Madam Toad—the matriarch of the Kikkert Family.
What does it mean to be human? What does it take to be a family? Pigeon is willing to risk his life to learn and to love.
You can buy “Pigeon” on Amazon (and other places) here.
You can Read the first 2 Chapters here.
In 2024, “Pigeon” won the Golden Wizard Award.
The FATOFF Conspiracy
by Olga Werby
Transdimensional Industries gave the world a technical solution to the obesity epidemic—eat more than you want, and store all that you want in their fat storage tanks conveniently located outside of our set of dimensions. Complete gluttony without sacrificing beauty or health…for a price.
You can be rich and buy a thin body. You can be poor and lucky enough to get government assistance with your personal fat storage—Federal Assistance with Transdimensional Offloading of Fat and Flab. Or you can win the tits lottery—a lifetime of free blubber storage in the Transdimensional Industries’ tanks where all the humanity’s fat is stored. Thin people live well, have high paying jobs, and wield all of the social and political power and prestige while consuming unlimited quantities of food as mandated by the government. Fat people? They don’t do so well.
You can buy “The FATOFF Conspiracy” on Amazon (and other places) here.
You can Read the first 2 Chapters here.
Just got a couple of reviews from INKITT and wanted to share them — thank you!
Twin Time
by Olga and Christopher Werby
A story of Orlov family exodus from Imperial Russia that spans 100 years and is bound by a time-traveling autistic girl.
Alex and Sasha are twin sisters, physically identical down to their freckles. But the resemblance is only skin deep—Sasha is profoundly autistic, while Alex is not. Sasha can’t communicate and acts bizarrely, and the family revolves around her and her intense needs.
Yet the aged, wealthy, and mysterious Aunt Nana seems to have a particular interest in both girls. Offering a helping hand, she encourages the family to move to San Francisco to be near her. And when the young twins discover a tunnel in Nana’s tool shed, it leads them on a journey across the world and back 100 years in time. The tunnel is a pathway to the Firebird Estate, the home of their ancestors, located in rural Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century. Even more remarkable, though the effect that twisting time has on cognition, Sasha is not autistic when she’s at the Firebird Estate.
Now, growing up in two strikingly different times and places, the twins must face their separate destinies among the ravages of the incipient Russian Revolution. Can they save their families on both sides of the tunnel? Can they simultaneously stay true to their own hearts, to each other, and to the people they left behind? Each sister must face her own personal challenge—but only together can they discover their own future within their family’s past.
You can Read the first few Chapters here.
You can buy “Twin Time” on Amazon (and other places) here.
In 2024, “Twin Time won the Golden Wizard Award.
Becoming Animals
by Olga and Christopher Werby
Humans have always wanted to know what goes on inside the minds of other animals. But what if humans could become animals? Toby’s father leads a team of neuroscientists directly connecting the brains of humans with those of animals. And Toby is a prodigy at throwing her mind into the animal subjects in his lab—she’s the best there is.
But Toby suffers from cystic fibrosis and she’s not likely to live into adulthood. Could a radical plan to embed her consciousness into an animal allow Toby to survive? And what does it mean to live without a human body?
Can Toby and her father solve the problem of fully merging two beings before she takes her last breath? Will the government succeed in stopping their efforts before they are done? It’s a race against death and into the minds of animals.
You can Read the first few Chapters here.
You can buy “Becoming Animals” on Amazon (and other places) here.
Becoming Animals won the 2018 Bronze Medal in the Young Adult Science Fiction category!
In 2024, “Becoming Animals” won the Golden Wizard Award.
Lizard Girl & Ghost: The Chronicles of DaDA Immortals
by Olga Werby
A child lies dying. To save her, to preserve some of her identity, memories need to be retrieved from her avatar—Lizard Girl. Jude’s dad is using a cyber reality game to recover some of his sick girl’s memories in an attempt to restore brain function. The avatar’s personality patterns help patch the holes in Jude’s brain ravaged by the disease.
But what becomes of a virtual mind left to roam in cyberspace after its host falls sick? The Far Cinct is a cyber city forbidden to school kids and average citizens. The Far Cinct is where rogue entities go to hide and to innovate and to die. It’s where illegal cyber enhancements and compulsions are sold to those who have the money and the connections to find them. But that’s cyberspace for you—nothing is ever what it appears to be on the surface.
As Jude’s consciousness starts to slip, her cyber awareness gains independence. What is a girl’s avatar without her human? Can consciousness and identity be tied up in a digital world without the wet works of a human body? Jump into the world of weird and surreal, and as you journey to look for memories of a sick girl, you might accidentally discover a virtual soul of her avatar.
Cyberpunk meets Sleeping Beauty meets cats… werecats
You can Read the first few Chapters here.
In 2024, “Pigeon” won the Golden Wizard Award.
Harvest
by Olga Werby
Almost a century after Keres Triplets asteroid impact and subsequent nuclear exchange nearly ended all human life on Earth, a strange artifact is discovered on one of the moons of Saturn. Who should be sent to the outer reaches of the solar system to initiate the first contact with an alien culture? Dr. Varsaad Volhard, an evolutionary-socio-historian, is chosen to help the world understand the alien civilization that left an artifact some thirty thousand years ago, before humans even learned to farm, at the time when other human species still walked the earth. While Vars prepares for the mission, her father, Dr. Matteo Volhard, discovers nanobots among the microplastics he studies. The bots are everywhere and seem to have been created to bond with human cyber implants. Why? Matteo is made to keep his discovery a secret…as well as his and his daughter’s true origins. Both were donated to a Human DNA Vault as babies. Matteo was raised as a Seed before leaving with his young daughter to study ecology around the world. Who knows what? Who is in control? How does one communicate with non-human intelligence? People seem to die in gruesome ways as their cyberhumatics go haywire on Earth and on Luna and Mars colonies. Is Earth under attack or is it all just a cosmic misunderstanding? Vars needs to use all she knows to solve the mystery of the ancient civilization on Mimas, as her dad battles the alien nanobots at home.
You can Read the first few Chapters here.
You can buy “Harvest” on Amazon (and other places) here.
You can read “Harvest” prequel, “Fresh Seed,” on Kindle.
God of Small Affairs
by Olga Werby
Time is made out of threads. Pull one and someplace somewhere things unravel. We know how to pull on the right thread because we see the whole tapestry of life’s possibilities. That’s why we are so good at finding a good path into a future. I say a future because there is no such thing as the future.
We are made of time threads–thick bundles of knots that can pull and twist and change the course of history. It’s all about connections–pull one strand, and the others twist with it. Like Newton’s second law, for every action there is an equal an opposite reaction. But we are small in relation to civilized time, planetary time, cosmological time. To make a big change requires a course correction many many years prior. Like if you want to deflect a meteor hurtling toward Earth, you need to change its course far out in space where just a nudge would do it. To make a course correction close to the impact event, a lot of energy is required. Same with history…
So we are great at little things, at manipulating tiny threads of life. We are the gods of small affairs…until we are not. “God of Small Affairs” is a creepy and slightly twisted mystery tale of a small mid-Western town, struggling to survive, told from the perspective of man who is culturally a stranger there and yet learns to find comfort and gives back love to people in need…his and those that reside in the town of Wilkins. It’s a bit of a horror story, a bit of fantastical science fiction, and a take on what the world would be if one could talk directly to a god…even a god who is only interested in micro-management of human species.
Jon Uolan is the grandson of First Nation tribe elder. His assignment is to bring home a god. Not the omnipresent god or the god that set the weight of the proton and the rate of universal expansion, but rather an everyday kind of god, the god that lives among her people, the god of small affairs, Ay-Tal Blue.
An easy assignment turns into a nightmare when Ay-Tal gets accidentally shot and Jon becomes a suspect in a murder investigation. And while Jon is in prison, a huge earthquake and tsunami wipe out his home village. His grandfather dies in the disaster. With his people scattered and living apart, the whole tribe might cease to exist. The new generation just is not interested in the old tribal ways. Ay-Tal is no longer there to help and guide them.
What is Jon to do? How will a new path into the future shape the people who got mixed up with a god of small affairs?
You can Read the first few Chapters here.
You can buy “God of Small Affairs” on Amazon (and other places).
You can read the reviews here.
Good Girl
by Olga Werby
Spaceflight AI Aide, SAIA, has one main job onboard a colony mission spaceship to Tau Ceti star system — to keep its crew alive and sane for the 24 lonely years it would take them to reach their destination. She can play games, read books, carry on conversations on almost any topic and in any language. Saia is a very good girl, but something keeps happening to her charges. Was there an accident? Did somebody die? Saia can’t remember. And there are all these people who are not in her roster of passengers that keep popping up and talking with her.
“Good Girl” is a story about meanings and hidden context buried in words. As we teach our AIs to take on more and more difficult tasks, their learning algorithms become black boxes to us. What are they really learning? What are they thinking? Just take a peek.
Mirror Shards
by Olga Werby
Trapped Between Infinite Possible Realities
Hig is a disabled kid with a loving family and a doting uncle. On a trip to a county fair, the family encounters a mysterious “Mirror of Wishes” booth that leads to radical, unexplained, sometimes tragic changes in their lives.
Years later, Hig takes his girlfriend to another county fair, where they encounter the same booth and its proprietor. A bizarre chain of events ensues as they discover that Mistress Kismet’s booth is a portal that has been altering people’s realities and fates for many generations.
The places he visits and the lessons he learns cause Hig to become desperate to return his own timestream or find a new one where his family can all be together, before it’s too late and he’s blocked from switching fates.
But can any place Hig ends up ever feel like home? Does love span multiple timestreams? Does the portal offer a permanent answer to the question “What if I could have the life of my choosing?” Or is it a nightmare of neverending change?
You can Read the first few Chapters here.
You can buy “Mirror Shards” on Amazon (and other places).
In 2024, “Mirror Shards” won the International Impact Book Award.
