About the Author

Ken Bandoly is a science fiction author, Marine Corps veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, IT engineer, and father of two. His stories are born from hard-earned resilience and a relentless curiosity about what happens when humanity is pushed to the edge of extinction—and beyond.

After years in the tech world and tours in warzones, Ken turned his focus to the stars, exploring deep philosophical questions through fast-paced, character-driven adventures. His Out Of Time series fuses speculative science, military grit, and emotional depth in a future where survival depends on more than just firepower.

When he’s not writing or debugging code, you’ll find him hobby farming, crafting, exploring wormhole physics, or how much caffeine is too much.

How I got the idea

How

Out Of Time

Was Born

It started with a quiet night, a telescope, and the haunting shimmer of Kepler-452b in some distant NASA render. I’d just finished a string of laborious tasks, was knee-deep in sci-fi headlines and black hole theories, trying to find escape… and had that itch—the one veterans know well—when your body’s home but your brain’s still scanning horizons.

I kept asking myself: What happens when humanity reaches beyond Earth’s gravity? What if I could blast into the great unknown at relativistic speeds, never to return? What if the last hope isn’t a government, or a general, but a damaged crew on a ship nobody believes in? The answers didn’t come all at once. They crept in. One character. One colony. One broken AI whispering in the dark… and the question of what else is out there.

Before I knew it, I was neck-deep in wormholes, rebellion, and moral dilemmas coded into quantum drives. And there was no going back.

But it wasn’t just the storytelling that pulled me in—it was the science. The energy calculations for faster-than-light travel (and yes, my fellow nerds out there will point out that my time dilation is inaccurate for 0.98c, but perhaps the bending of space-time for the shielding required at those speeds helped out a little bit. In truth, I confess—it’s the one place I let the story outpace my hard SF aims).

I’ve always been fascinated by the philosophical implications of cranial implants and human-computer interfaces. I found myself spiraling into questions like: What if we could upload consciousness to a machine? Would it still be us—or just a program wearing our face and imitating our personality? And what would that do to sanity, to perception, to identity, if the mind suddenly expanded with digital processing power it was never evolved to handle? Would we just vanish—lost in a swirl of recursive code, trapped in a dark corner of RAM, thinking we were still alive?

And then there’s alien life. Surely it’s out there. But what would it mean to encounter something so completely other—morals, culture, physiology—none of it remotely human? What happens when the real unknown isn’t out there in space… but inside our own minds?

So many questions to explore—and I’m just getting started.

Out Of Time isn’t just a book series. It’s a signal flare—launched from the edge of what we know, aimed at anyone wondering what comes next when humanity runs out of easy answers. This is an exploration of my questions and adventures. These stories are my therapy and my attempt at expression. I hope you enjoy them half as much as I've enjoyed writing them.