Matt’s path to novel writing has not been a straight one, as life seemed to decide he needed to explore other forms of writing first. He first completed a 100k word PhD History thesis, entitled “Religion: Jedi” Myth and Metaphysics in Science Fiction Film from 1977 – 1997. However, academia didn’t have any jobs for talking about sci-fi film, and a PhD makes you wildly overqualified to be a film reviewer. So instead, Matt had to find other applications for his skills. To that end, he found work writing policy documents for a major Australian university, a local government and submissions to the Australian Senate.