Hi, I’m Shawn Dove, writer, biologist, and author of Entering Darkness. I’m not going to tell you my life story, but I’ll give you a few brief snippets to help you understand what and why I write.

Shawn Dove profile image

My aim, through both my books and my blog, is to entertain, inspire, and provoke thoughtful discussion about important and relevant topics. Although I study and work as a scientist, I remain a critic of dogma and partisanship in any field of thought, including science.

The current world climate being what it is, I think it’s especially important to promote unity and understanding between people with seemingly incompatible worldviews, and I feel that fiction and blogging are both great vehicles to do that.

Why I Wrote Entering Darkness

I was inspired to write Entering Darkness because I am fascinated by the strange and uneasy relationship between faith and science that exists in some parts of the world, especially the United States, where an astonishing proportion of the Bible belt rejects evolution and the majority of scientists do not believe in a god. I grew up attending a fundamentalist Christian church that taught Creationism as fact, and later left the church and became a biologist, so I’ve seen both sides.

What would happen, I thought, if someone were to discover convincing scientific evidence of a higher being?

As I am neither religious nor an atheist, this was intended to be a thought experiment, not a propaganda piece. Turning the idea into a believable story was much more difficult than I envisioned, but I believe the resulting book was worth every frustrated and sleepless night I spent producing it. That’s why I’m willing to do all the hard work it will take to eventually get it into the hands of readers like you.

How It Started

I did not grow up dreaming of writing novels for a living. At the age of 19 I became convinced that it was my destiny to write bestselling novels. It wasn’t. I soon realized that getting published is not a simple matter of writing books and sending them off to agents or publishers. It is, for most people, a multi-year journey filled with hard work, disappointment and perseverance. I had talent, but my dreams exceeded my fortitude. I floundered.

Life Change

I’ve always enjoyed both reading and writing fictional stories and living vicariously through the characters and their adventures. But at some point I decided it might be more interesting to just go and have adventures myself. So I went off to travel the world on my own, met the love of my life on a boat in Indonesia, moved halfway across the world (from Canada to Europe) to be with her, became a conservation biologist, and started a family. Someday I will find the time to write again, only with a few more life experience points.

Shawn Dove standing on a ship