About Senan

Fully paid-up to the “glass-half-full” club

Senan Mahon lives in a small town on Ireland’s south coast, where the Atlantic storms unleash their fury against a rugged coast of cliffs and sea-stacks.

Cast your mind back to 2020 and Covid has us all locked up in our own little worlds of existential angst. What’s a lifelong science-fiction fan gonna do, to take his mind off the doom-scrolling?

“Put your money where your mouth is” says the long-suffering wife. So I did…

The result was Consequential, a novella about an Irish scientist in space, who gets a chance to save the world. Set in a future where Covid’s sneaky cousin has ravaged the planet, it asks, what would we have done, if the pandemic had taken a very different path.

And that was it. I’d caught the bug. (NO, not that one!) Writing it turned out to be far more fun than I’d ever imagined. I couldn’t leave it at that. The next two years took me on an emotional rollercoaster of highs and lows (mostly highs TBH) as I sweated over the plot of my space-opera epic The Blue Race. It’s out there now in the big bad world, if you want to give it a try. I hope you get as much fun out of reading it, as I had writing it.

Much to my surprise, The Blue Race went down moderately well with its readers. (They obviously had far too much free time on thier hands, if you ask me!) So I decided to whip out the biro (laptop actually!) and have another go. Some eighteen months of sweating and bad language later, the next installment in the series was born. Leaning a bit further into hard sci-fi territory, it seemed that a grander title was needed. And so The Arithmetic of Echoes was unleashed on an unsuspecting readership. If you liked the first installment, this one will probably tickle your fancy too.

So, I suppose if you have read this far, you might want to know a little bit about me. You can probably gather from the picture, that I’m no spring chicken. I’ll leave it up to you to guess my age. I’ve lived my entire life in Ireland, and had a very rewarding career as software developer, which I'm now retired from. Science and science-fiction have been life-long passions since my teenage years, when a forward-thinking uncle gifted me a copy of James Burke’s ‘Connections’.

These days I get my science fix mostly from podcasts. Some of my favourites are CBC’s Quirks & Quarks, the tongue-in-cheek BBC Infinite Monkey Cage and Newstalk’s excellent Futureproof.

When I’m not writing speculative fiction, my other gig is co-hosting an Irish science podcast called Enough, with the science! It’s a fun take on serious science. Check it out, if you like that sort of thing.

Oh, and keep your eyes peeled for my next novel…

Senan