Hugh Watkins — Author
Hugh Watkins writes hard science fiction from a farm in Georgia, where he also restores vintage computers and extracts gold from quartz with a rock crusher he built himself.
Contact
Books
Zero-Point Prop
Joseph Wright builds movie props for a living. He's good at it — the best in Georgia, maybe anywhere. A Georgia Tech engineer who ended up in Atlanta's film industry after a startup went sideways and took his marriage with it.
When a screenwriter hands him AI-generated specs for a sci-fi film's fusion reactor, Joseph builds it to spec. Every tolerance. Every detail. The way he builds everything. Then it powers up for real.
Now Joseph is running secret tests on a soundstage at midnight, filling notebooks with equations, and missing weekends with his daughter. His best friend thinks he's having a bipolar episode. His estranged wife thinks the same thing. Federal agents are asking questions about the prop that Joseph can't answer without sounding insane.
The device works. Joseph can prove it — to himself. Proving it to anyone else might cost him everything he has left.
A near-future thriller about the collision of genius and mental illness, set in the machine shops and soundstages of Atlanta's booming film industry.
Retro Fold
At the end of the Cold War, a physicist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory was pursuing an unsanctioned project that could reshape modern physics. Then he vanished — his lab seized, his research classified, his name erased from the record.
Thirty-five years later, Ethan Cole — fourteen years old, a prodigy, more capable than engineers twice his age — purchases the physicist's old Apple II at an estate sale. Inside, he finds hand-built hardware, encrypted disks, and notebooks full of equations thought to have disappeared with the physicist. The work was revolutionary and ahead of its time. Decades ahead.
Fully realizing the physicist's vision wasn't possible with 1980s technology. But three decades of advancement have closed the gap — and Ethan has the skills to finish what was started. The question is whether he should. The last person who tried never came home.
Sometimes going back is the only way forward.
What readers are saying
"This story perfectly straddles the thin line. Looking forward to the next steps for the Cole family." — ★★★★★
"I do love the basic love letter for the Woz and Apple ][ generation of things and the character building has been quite good." — ★★★★★
"A coming of age story of a very different kind. Two timelines with a fantastic ending." — ★★★★★
"An excellent and thought provoking work of fiction. The characterizations were superb; unusual in the science fiction universe." — ★★★★★
"It remind me a lot of books by Laurence Dahners. The characterization was quite good, the science was interesting and I was captivated to read until the end." — ★★★★★
About
Hugh Watkins has been obsessed with how things work since he was fourteen, when he bought an Apple II and taught himself to program. A degree in physics and forty years in software followed, but the obsession never changed — just the machines.
He's a lifelong hard sci-fi reader who grew up on Clarke and Asimov and believes the best science fiction makes you feel like you could build it yourself. When he's not writing, he restores vintage computers, builds equipment on his farm in Georgia — including a rock crusher for extracting gold from quartz — and disappears into the mountains.
Retro Fold is his debut novel and the first book in a multi-book series.