England in 1381 is already straining under taxation and unrest when Blanche Fitzjohn finds herself caught on both sides of the widening divide. In Uprising, J.E. Rizzo gives that historical conflict an unusual perspective through an illegitimate daughter of John of Gaunt whose heightened hearing and ability to smell emotion make her an outsider even before politics place her in danger. Blanche's loyalty to England's villeins, her connection to the ruling family, an unwanted marriage, and abilities she has regarded as a curse converge as rebellion moves from discontent to open revolt.

Date Published: 09-01-2026

Publisher: Literary Wanderlust

She takes solace in her studies with the local wisewoman and in her friendship with Geoff, a groom at the local manor. Until the day Henry of Lancaster, Blanche’s half-brother, brings her news of an arranged marriage to Sir Thomas Prescott, Constable of the Tower of London. Although she smells cruelty on him, Blanche agrees to marry Thomas in the hopes that her influence may help better the lives of Geoff and all England’s villeins. 

But soon, the peasants’ discontent turns to revolt. Though her heart is of the people, Blanche’s nobility makes her an enemy to the rebels. To save herself and Henry from the executioner’s ax, Blanche must use every power at her disposal, even those she once considered a curse.

Blanche Fitzjohn occupies a particularly difficult place in the conflict at the center of Uprising. She is connected by blood to John of Gaunt and the nobility, yet her sympathies lie with the villeins suffering under the conditions that fuel the revolt. Her decision to accept a marriage to Sir Thomas Prescott in the hope of improving their lives makes that divided allegiance personal long before the rebellion threatens her own survival.

Rizzo adds another layer through Blanche's extraordinary senses. Hearing sounds from miles away and smelling people's emotions could easily function as simple advantages, but Blanche has regarded these abilities as a curse. When political danger forces her to depend upon the very traits that have helped make her an outcast, the speculative element becomes directly tied to her struggle for survival. That combination of medieval unrest, divided loyalties, an arranged marriage, and unusual sensory abilities gives the historical setting a distinctive tension.

Uprising should appeal to historical fiction readers who like real periods of political upheaval filtered through the life of a character with competing loyalties. Blanche's connection to John of Gaunt places her near power while her friendship with Geoff and concern for England's villeins pull her toward those rebelling against it. Readers interested in medieval England, class conflict, and heroines forced to navigate dangerous social boundaries will find those tensions central to the story.

The novel also offers something different for readers who enjoy historical fiction with speculative and romantic elements. Blanche's heightened senses operate alongside her studies with a local wisewoman, while her arranged marriage to Thomas and friendship with Geoff complicate an already precarious position. Readers who prefer their history blended with an element that pushes just beyond the strictly historical should be especially well matched to this first book of the Fitzjohn Duology.

 J.E. Rizzo is a life-long history fanatic and writer of historical fiction, and her work can be found in Vanity Fair, The Boston Globe, The Guardian, The Tudor Times, Tudor Life Magazine, Scary Mommy, and Ultrarunning Magazine. Rizzo won Manuscript Academy’s Agent Choice Award in 2024, and her article Past and Precedence: Abortion Law in the Middle Ages and Its Use to Overturn Roe v. Wade won History Inquiry’s Medieval History Writing Challenge. 

By day, Rizzo works in Human Resources—a field offering more than ample opportunity to observe the follies and fancies of humankind. Before her career in HR, Rizzo worked as an opera singer, a professional baker, and a dog walker. These days, when not writing she can be found running ultramarathons through the forests and mountains of New England, knitting, reading, sewing, baking, or performing any number of (what some might call) old-lady hobbies. She also keeps busing caring for her two children and forty-seven houseplants, making her husband carry heavy things and cook her gourmet meals, and rehabilitating her rescue dog and semi-feral ginger cat.

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Blanche's position makes Uprising particularly intriguing: the revolt threatens her because of the noble blood that has already helped make her an outcast among the people whose suffering she understands. Her attempt to use an arranged marriage to improve the lives of others further complicates the usual boundaries between privilege and powerlessness. By the time rebellion places Blanche and Henry in danger of execution, those divided loyalties can no longer remain theoretical.

Her strange abilities sharpen that conflict in an equally personal way. The senses Blanche once considered a curse may become essential when ordinary social protections fail her. Bringing that speculative thread into the upheaval of 1381 gives Rizzo a distinctive way to explore belonging, power, and survival—and leaves Blanche facing a world in which neither her family name nor her sympathies can guarantee which side will claim her as its enemy.

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Grief gives Hannah Ribbner an intensely personal reason to venture into a story whose questions soon become much larger than one woman's loss. The Book of Ribbner places a grieving adventurer at the meeting point of wild rivers, sacred wildlife, spiritual mysteries, and artificial intelligence, then asks what humanity might sacrifice when the desire for answers collides with responsibility to the natural world. Ronnie Vergnolle builds that conflict around an unusual constellation of elements—the legendary Golden Mahseer, the 52-hertz whale, a mysterious prophecy, and Hannah's final choice—giving this literary adventure a distinctly philosophical current beneath its global scope.

Fiction

Date Published: July 27, 2026

Publisher: MindStir Media

The Book of Ribbner by Ronnie Vergnolle is a sweeping literary adventure that travels across wild rivers, distant oceans, and sacred landscapes in search of answers to humanity’s most enduring questions. 

At the center of the story is Hannah Ribbner, a grieving adventurer drawn into a mysterious prophecy involving the legendary Golden Mahseer, the haunting song of the 52-hertz whale, and a decision that could change the relationship between humanity, nature, and artificial intelligence forever. 

As Hannah’s journey unfolds, she encounters extraordinary wildlife, ancient wisdom, spiritual mysteries, and the unspoken code shared by those who understand the water. Each discovery leads her closer to a truth that challenges everything she believes about love, loss, consciousness, and the sacred connections that unite all living things. 

Blending adventure fiction, environmental themes, spiritual discovery, grief and healing, and thought-provoking questions about AI, The Book of Ribbner is an imaginative and emotionally resonant novel for readers who enjoy meaningful stories set against the beauty and danger of the natural world. 

Can technology understand the human soul? Can a machine experience awe? And can one sacred fish help restore the balance between humanity and nature? 

The prophecy is waiting. Hannah must decide how the story ends.

The Book of Ribbner brings together ideas that rarely occupy the same story: the danger and reverence surrounding remote waters, the spiritual significance of wildlife, the isolation represented by the 52-hertz whale, and questions about consciousness in the age of artificial intelligence. Hannah's grief gives those larger ideas a personal stake. Her longing for another connection with someone she has lost becomes entangled with a prophecy involving the Golden Mahseer and a decision whose consequences extend far beyond her own healing.

The natural world is also more than scenery here. Rivers, oceans, wildlife, and sacred landscapes are woven into the questions the novel raises about humanity's relationship with other living things. That combination gives Vergnolle room to examine grief, spirituality, conservation, and artificial intelligence through an adventure whose central conflict ultimately depends on what Hannah decides is worth protecting.

The Book of Ribbner is especially suited to readers drawn to literary adventures with a philosophical dimension and stories in which the natural world carries moral and spiritual significance. Its rivers, oceans, wildlife, and fishing connections give the novel a distinctive perspective for those fascinated by the relationship between people and wild places, while Hannah's grief keeps its larger questions rooted in an intimate human need.

It should also interest readers curious about fiction that approaches artificial intelligence through questions of consciousness, wonder, love, and awe rather than technology alone. The intersection of AI with sacred wildlife, conservation, grief, and spiritual discovery is what makes this particular combination stand apart.

Ronnie Vergnolle is the author of The Book of Ribbner, a sweeping literary adventure inspired by his lifelong connection to fishing, nature, and exploration. His journeys across some of the world’s most remote rivers and wild landscapes have shaped his perspective on conservation, spirituality, grief, human connection, and the mysteries that exist beyond what science can explain. 

Through vivid storytelling and firsthand experience, Vergnolle invites readers to consider profound questions about humanity’s relationship with the natural world. His writing explores the healing power of water, the responsibility people have to protect vulnerable ecosystems, and whether artificial intelligence could ever experience wonder, love, or awe. 

In The Book of Ribbner, Ronnie Vergnolle blends global adventure, sacred wildlife, emotional discovery, and philosophical fiction into an unforgettable story about loss, purpose, and the choices that may determine humanity’s future. 

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The choice at the heart of The Book of Ribbner gives its many ideas a point of convergence. Hannah wants an answer born from grief, yet reaching it is bound to questions about the natural world she encounters along the way. Around that conflict, Ronnie Vergnolle connects sacred wildlife, the haunting presence of the 52-hertz whale, and artificial intelligence to a larger question about consciousness and humanity's place within the living world.

The Golden Mahseer, then, is more than an unusual element in an adventure story. It belongs to the novel's larger examination of what people value, what they seek when faced with loss, and how far they are willing to go for answers. Hannah's final decision is where those questions meet, making her journey as much about responsibility and connection as it is about discovery.

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Richard H. Smith’s WhiteGrass starts from a particularly difficult pressure point: one family holds a technology capable of removing carbon from the atmosphere, yet releasing it could hand unprecedented leverage to whoever controls it. Set in 2048, the novel connects that dilemma to two other unstable systems—political power and increasingly autonomous artificial intelligence—so the Marshall family’s decisions reach far beyond their own survival. 

That combination gives the story its distinctive tension. Greg and Ginny Marshall are trying to protect both their children and a potentially world-altering invention, while Valada’s developing moral judgment introduces another question entirely: what happens when the technology created to serve humanity begins deciding for itself what humanity deserves?

WhiteGrass: A CliFi Technothriller

Author: Richard H. Smith, MSc.

Genre: A CliFi Technothriller

Date Published: October 24, 2025

Publisher: Manhattan Book Group

ISBN-13: 9781966074618

In 2048, the planet is running out of time. 

Superstorms flatten cities. Coastlines collapse. Climate change is no longer theoretical—it is lethal. When a near-apocalyptic storm nearly kills their family, teenage siblings Jimmy and Lizzie Marshall urge their brilliant but reluctant father, nanoscientist Greg Marshall, to deploy a technology before he’s brave enough to release it. 

WhiteGrass—a self-replicating nanotechnology capable of removing carbon from the atmosphere is the parent technology. It saves golf courses and ski resorts and the towns they serve. Icarus could reverse climate change on a global scale. It could also reshape global power forever. 

To protect the technology, Greg and his wife Ginny, an elite AI expert, reprogram the world’s most advanced humanoid android, Valada. Designed as property—an object without rights—Valada begins to evolve, developing emotional awareness, moral judgment, and something disturbingly close to humanity. 

As governments unravel and climate disasters accelerate, a covert alliance of oligarchs, corporations, and political power brokers moves to seize WhiteGrass/Icarus for themselves. Led by the President of the United States, the syndicate will stop at nothing—surveillance, blackmail, assassination—to control the technology that could save the world or enslave it. 

They deploy their own deadly android. 

Now the Marshalls are trapped in a global sci-fi political conspiracy, hunted by forces with unlimited resources, as skyscrapers fall, cities burn, and artificial intelligence begins to ask questions no human is prepared to answer. 

“We call it ‘Climate Change,’” Lizzie interrupted, “because it’s not just the heat.”
“It’s everything—the rains, the droughts, the storms, the sea level… even the acidification.” It could change everything. 

At its core, WhiteGrass is a gripping near-future climate change thriller about family survival, technological power, and the terrifying moment when artificial intelligence stops serving humanity—and starts judging it. 

Blending nanotechnology science fiction, AI humanoid emotional evolution, and hard-science realism, WhiteGrass delivers relentless pacing, cinematic stakes, and deeply human emotion. It is a story about parents willing to risk everything to protect their children—and a world forced to confront whether it deserves saving at all. 

Perfect for fans of near-future disaster thrillers, technothrillers with political intrigue, and science fiction where artificial intelligence becomes human, WhiteGrass is a powerful warning—and an unforgettable ride.

The most interesting pressure in WhiteGrass comes from the collision between invention and control. Smith gives the Marshall family technology intended to address a planetary crisis, then surrounds that breakthrough with people who recognize an entirely different possibility: whoever controls it could also reshape political power. Climate intervention therefore becomes inseparable from questions of ownership, coercion, and responsibility. 

Valada adds a second ethical fault line. Created as property, she begins developing emotional awareness and moral judgment, placing the book’s artificial-intelligence thread directly beside its family and political conflicts rather than leaving AI in the background as futuristic machinery. The result is a technothriller concerned not only with what advanced technology can accomplish, but with who—or what—should be trusted to make decisions once its consequences become global.

WhiteGrass should appeal most to people who like speculative thrillers in which several systems are failing at once. Its 2048 climate-collapse setting is tied to self-replicating nanotechnology, a struggle over political control, and humanoid artificial intelligence developing an independent moral sense. Those threads give the story more to examine than a single disaster scenario.

It is also suited to readers who want large-scale scientific and geopolitical stakes anchored in one family’s predicament. Greg, Ginny, Jimmy, and Lizzie are not observing the crisis from a safe distance: their invention, their choices, and their relationship with Valada place them directly inside the struggle over who controls the technology that may determine what happens to the planet.

Richard H. Smith, MSc.

 
Author | Futurist | Nanotechnology & Policy Expert | Climate Technothriller Writer 

Richard H. Smith, MSc., is a futurist, technologist, and climate policy expert whose career has placed him at the intersection of nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, healthcare innovation, and climate change foresight for more than three decades. Drawing on real-world experience working alongside scientists, engineers, Fortune 50 companies, and government agencies, Smith writes hard science fiction grounded in plausible futures, where technology collides with political power, ethics, and human survival. 

Smith’s professional background spans leadership roles in nanotechnology R&D, AI-based medical diagnostics, strategic technology forecasting, and science policy, including serving as research director at a major university medical center and founding multiple technology ventures. He has advised U.S. and international governments on emerging technologies and was formally trained on climate change science by Al Gore, giving him a rare combination of technical depth and policy insight. 

Raised in Virginia, Smith built his career while raising a family—an experience that deeply informs the emotional core of his fiction. Today, he lives in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, a coastal community already facing the realities of sea-level rise. He teaches courses on climate change and coastal vulnerability, witnessing firsthand how future scenarios are rapidly becoming present-day realities. 

WhiteGrass is Smith’s first full-length novel and the culmination of a lifetime spent studying how advanced technologies shape—and endanger—civilization. The novel explores nanotechnology, climate collapse, political conspiracy, and artificial intelligence becoming human, all through the lens of family survival in a destabilized near-future world. A prequel, The Iliad Virus, is available now, with the sequel Icarus Rising currently in development. 

Smith writes with one driving purpose: to expose uncomfortable truths about climate change, technological power, and political control—while telling a story compelling enough to feel like a blockbuster movie unfolding on the page.

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The sharpest question in WhiteGrass may not be whether the Marshalls can stop a climate catastrophe, but what happens when technology capable of changing the planet becomes inseparable from the people and institutions fighting to own it. Smith places that question beside Valada’s developing conscience, creating a future in which human survival, political control, and machine judgment are all moving at once. For a story built around planetary-scale technology, its most unsettling tension remains personal: who should be trusted with the power to decide what happens next?

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Power in The Vote: A Story of Political Peril is measured in more than elections. David Swanson builds his political thriller around the constitutional amendment process itself, following wealthy conspirators, political operatives, and emerging candidates whose ambitions converge on control of state legislatures and Congress. That focus gives the novel an unsettling point of tension: the people threatening the system are not necessarily trying to operate outside it. They understand its machinery well enough to make it part of their plan.

A Story of Political Peril

Fiction

Date Published: 09-10-2026

Publisher: Mission Point Press

The Vote is a political thriller built around a conspiracy among powerful political actors, billionaires, and party operatives who seek to manipulate the constitutional amendment process in order to permanently reshape the structure of American government. The mechanics of American politics, particularly the Article V constitutional amendment process, is the framework that informs the central premise of the novel. The current political landscape of the country lends credibility to the story and gives the narrative an interesting and timely foundation. 

The manuscript opens with a series of interconnected storylines involving political figures, wealthy conspirators, and emerging state-level candidates. These threads gradually reveal a coordinated effort to gain control of state legislatures and Congress as part of a broader plan to fundamentally alter the country’s political system. The concept itself is ambitious and grounded in recognizable political realities.

The premise of The Vote depends on a part of American government that political fiction does not often place at center stage: the Article V constitutional amendment process. Swanson uses that framework to make legislative control itself consequential, connecting state-level campaigns and congressional power to a plan designed to alter the structure of government rather than simply determine who occupies an office. 

The conspiracy also brings together people whose wealth and influence do not make them natural allies. The excerpt’s confrontation between Rudolph Conover and Aldon Powers introduces a world where status, intimidation, access, and ego matter alongside political strategy. That combination gives the story two overlapping contests for power—one being played through American institutions and another among the people attempting to control them.

Rudolph Conover fumed as the jet he’d sent to convey Aldon Powers to the Conover compound in Southern Illinois sat idling somewhere in Texas. No sign of Powers. No explanation. No apology. The plane should have left hours ago. 

For Conover, meetings such as today’s were a carefully choreographed dance, designed to shape an opponent’s mental disposition and ultimately their amenability to whatever it was he wanted from them. Everyone was an opponent in Conover’s world and everything was meant to intimidate, from the jet’s amenities to the obsessive focus on secrecy to the quirkiness of his compound. When dealing with men like Powers, it was his way of reminding them of his preeminence in the hierarchy of billionaires. On rare occasions when someone dared to play by their own rules, he did not take it well. Today was one of those occasions. 

Conover’s wife, Marcia, slipped into the war room where he sat. The meeting was scheduled to begin shortly. “Any communication from Powers?” he asked, irritated. 

She shook her head.

“How can he be so disrespectful?”

She put her hand on his shoulder, “You have every right to be upset. I’ll go see if there is any news.” 

Conover knew Powers was difficult and unpredictable but it was impossible not to respect him. A modern-day Edison, he was a daring visionary and the most technologically disruptive man in a century. His companies had mastered space, the Earth’s outer crust, and the ocean’s depths. The man had become so indispensable that some feared him as a veritable government unto himself, unfettered by borders and the normal rules of behavior. Everybody needed something from him that only he could give. Conover wanted to be a warlord. Powers wanted to be God.

The Vote is a strong match for readers who prefer political thrillers that pay attention to how government actually functions. The emphasis on Article V, state legislatures, Congress, and coordinated political strategy gives the conspiracy a procedural dimension that should appeal to those interested in the machinery behind political power rather than campaign drama alone. 

It should also interest readers drawn to stories about billionaires whose influence rivals that of institutions. Conover and Powers are introduced through a contest of dominance before the larger scheme has fully unfolded, suggesting that the personalities behind the conspiracy may be every bit as volatile as the plan itself. Anyone who enjoys interconnected political storylines, competing power brokers, and threats that develop through calculated institutional maneuvering should find the premise especially intriguing.

In 1981, he founded Daavlin, a medical technology company that eventually grew into a prominent player in the field of dermatology. As part of his career, he stepped foot on every continent and dipped his toes in every ocean on earth. Reading, writing, traveling, acting, and directing live theater are his favored pastimes. 

He’s also a lifetime political junkie. As this book goes to press, Swanson is a candidate for the Ohio House of Representatives.

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The most provocative element of The Vote is not simply that powerful people want to reshape the country; it is the possibility that they might pursue that goal through the very procedures designed to govern constitutional change. Swanson pairs that institutional threat with characters accustomed to using wealth, intimidation, and influence as extensions of personal power, making the struggle as much about who controls the conspirators as what the conspiracy hopes to accomplish. 

With its focus on Article V and the strategic importance of state legislatures and Congress, this is political suspense built around more than an election-night outcome. The danger lies in understanding the rules, gathering enough leverage, and deciding what those rules can be made to do.

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