About JD Shannon
John Shannon has spent more than thirty years in IT, which mostly means three decades thinking about how complicated systems work — and about the exact moment they don't. Writing as JD Shannon, that instinct now goes into fiction instead of infrastructure: two ongoing universes, both currently in progress. Alyosha is science fiction; Aerth is steampunk-inflected fantasy, where magic runs on rules as unforgiving as any circuit board. Different genres, same habit of mind — worlds that hold together because the mechanics, whether gears, code, or magic, were actually thought through, and characters who have to work inside those systems rather than around them.
The reading list that got him here runs wide: the unhurried competence of Nathan Lowell, the constructed-world density of Feist, Hickman, and Brooks, the sharp internal logic of Pratchett, the moral weight of Donaldson and Card, the technological unease of Gibson, and the sheer propulsive fun of Sigler and Murphy. JD Shannon writes somewhere in the overlap of all of it.
No published titles yet — several are in active work across both universes. The newsletter is the place to hear first when that changes.