Draft:Mord McGhee

Mord McGhee (birth date unknown) is an American author of literary works in English including 2024 Maya Angelou Book Award-nominated 'Ironblood' (Golden Storyline Books, UK 2023), as well as 'The Stroke of Oars' (Nat1 Pub LLC USA 2023) and 'Mind Poker' (Audience Askew 2024). McGhee was also an Honorable Mention in 2023 of L. Ron Hubbard's Writers of the Future Award.

Published biography indicates McGhee was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and lives in Little River, South Carolina.

Prior news of McGhee's literature includes winning a 2014 Dan Poynter's Silver Science Fiction Award, a Silver Falchion Finalist Award, a Newbery Medal nomination, and two Claymore Award Finalists.

= Writing Career =

The Ghosts Series
The Ghosts series

Cyberpunk series set in or around 2500 A.D. The events of the series take place both on and off earth proper. In a dystopia mostly ruled by giant corporations, medically enhanced humans add bionic modifications to give themselves superpowers such impossible strength, speed, and even flight. Rigs is one of the humans modified. A corporate sponsor known only as The Company paid to equip her body with implanted bionic weaponry and assault systems.

The first book in the series, Ghosts of San Francisco, is told backwards from the time when Rigs is arrested and detained by an unknown captor. Rigs is broken out of prison, which sets into motion the events of the second novel, Ghosts of the Golden Triangle.

Murder Red Ink
Murder Red Ink is a futuristic artificial intelligence dystopia novel blending Victorian true crime around the unsolved Jack the Ripper murders. The novel is set in future Chicago where technological ghosts and historical interface programs are a reality. The protagonist, Allena Gould, is a talented prodigy who witnesses murder through the eyes of the Ripper himself. The narration shifts between timelines, three main characters- including Jack the Ripper- and alternate multiple futuristic timelines which bridge the gap between the 21st Century and the Ghosts series.

Old Flames and Heroes
Old Flames and Heroes is a book about Oliver, a boy who tells his father and sister that he sees a blue sun in the sky alongside the yellow, natural sun. Oliver sees other paranormal and supernatural things. Oliver and his father take a road trip from Bentwood, a fictional suburb of Pittsburgh, PA, to Lake Champlain at the Vermont/New York/ Canadian border. It is revealed that the boy's mother died of a brain tumor and the last thing she spoke of was a blue sun. The father and sun voyage is narrated by the boy's older sister. There are direct ties between the Ghosts series and the Oliver timeline in the blue sun specifically. Loren Coleman provided a Foreword to the novel. The Buffalo News reported in an interview with the author that McGhee's experiences on the Old Niagara Seaway changed the direction of his original plot

Related Literary Works
Most of McGhee's published short stories regularly appear in literary journals  such as science fiction magazine Perihelion SF , Quibble Lit , Alien Dimensions  , Big Bend Literary , Barzakh(SUNY) , Vermilion , Audience Askew, Wingless Dreamer, Ariel Chart , Academy of the Heart and Mind , Last Girl's Club (under pseudonym Laniar D. Romon) , Creepy Magazine, Teach-Write Journal , and eV0ke!. 'American Idol', 'Bookbook', and 'Saw It on Archival Footage' published by Audience Askew and Nat1, LLC, some of a shared universe called Faewalk from Nat1, LLC.

Translations
McGhee translated several classic novels into reading experiences "aimed at the sensibilities of the modern American reader." The series includes Dracula, The Lost World, The Invisible Man, and The Call of Cthulhu. The description of the project by publisher TSPress was to maintain the classical spirit while enhancing the modern adventure. "Women are empowered and gone are the negative bigotries past," says the introduction from the editor.

Awards and Nominations
Nominated for 2024 Maya Angelou Book Award

Ghosts of San Francisco Dan Poynter's Global eBook Award Silver Science Fiction Winner in 2014

Old Flames and Heroes Silver Falchion Finalist in Best Fantasy Young Adult 14+ by Killer Nashville Literary and was nominated for an American Library Association's Newbery Medal

Honorable Mention by L. Ron Hubbard's Writers of the Future Contest Volume 39.

Two unpublished manuscripts were Claymore Award Finalists in 2022, Ironblood (see 2024 Maya Angelou Book Award nomination post-publication). and The Seven Children of God