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Blood Hunters

Blood Hunters is an “eco-thriller” novel for a teenage audience. The originality of Blood Hunters lies in the combination of scientific fact and philosophical reflection upon what can and cannot be known in an attempt to offer a fresh and original perspective on the natural world to a teenage audience. The example of fish in an aquarium being unaware of the existence of snow is used as a metaphor by one character, the implication being that having gained experience within the limitations of a finite world, endeavouring to understand the infinite is like trying to lift oneself up by one’s own bootstraps. The book was researched extensively to ensure that most of the scientific facts are true - it just takes them further. So NASA did use DepthX, a new kind of underwater sub to explore El Zacaton - the world's deepest underwater sinkhole, prior to its planned future use on Venus. It is generally agreed that the growth rate of the human population is both alarming and unsustainable. And eco-systems generally have growth-limiting factors (GLFs) which serve to put a brake on the imbalance that the growth of any one species creates. The Gaia theory famously looks at the earth as a single organism, so I simply took the idea of the human body's immune system reacting to perceived threat and used the single organism approach to allow the earth to create some rather unusual antibodies of its own. Through the genre of science fiction I have tried to do something original with known facts to write what one reviewer termed an 'eco-thriller' which is both entertaining and thought provoking for a younger audience.