Neuroscientist Terry Birdgenaw never intended to write fiction, but his wife’s challenge provided an unexpected motivation. After hearing his too-advanced ideas for her book, Children’s Author Ann Birdgenaw suggested Terry write a backstory targeted at young adults. Terry took the bait and enjoyed writing fiction so much he wrote a series. Cyborg Contact is the fourth book of The Antunite Chronicles.

Cyborg Contact follows our narrator from books 1 and 2 of the series as he visits near-future Earth. A parody of current U.S. politics, Dee goes on a North American road trip, trying to find the three Earthlings who visited his moon twenty-seven years earlier. Treated like a god by Earth insects and hunted as an illegal alien by humans, Dee's journey is a rollercoaster ride of calamities stemming from recent government mismanagement. Yet despite the turmoil, Dee makes close friends and finds true love in this hostile world. But will he escape from the icy clutches of his captors and charm the world, or wind up as a dissected and stuffed relic in the storerooms at Area 51?

The first three books of The Antunite Chronicles feature heroes battling leaders who use propaganda and tyranny to obtain power and wealth. Book 1: Antuna’s Story follows the lives of Earth insects transported through a wormhole to a far-off planet they call Poo-ponic. Young Antuna encourages the settlers to work together, but hexs later, conflicts resume, challenging Antuna and her friends’ progress. Book 2: The Rise and Fall of Antocracy is an Animal Farm-like story that tracks the insects’ evolution into cyborgs, the growth and decline of a fledgling democracy, and the destruction of life on the planet caused by a long-ignored climate crisis. It also follows the utopian society created by a group of cyborg insects that escape to Poo-ponic’s moon Bilaluna before Poo-ponic’s atmosphere collapses. Book 3: Antunites Unite is a work of speculative fiction in which rebel spies must dismantle a dystopian regime that uses histrionics, bionics, and socionics to subjugate its populace. It provides an illuminating look at how autocracies can impose radical change and the desperate measures required to reverse it.

Although Birdgenaw riddled the novels with details about insect behavior, he is not an entomologist. Yet his Ph.D. studies in neuroscience and psychology allow him to understand human behavior and what makes autocrats tick. Insect and human behavior are quite similar, as both work together to enhance survival and fight those seen as different. Humans have the same core motivations as their tiny neighbors underfoot, which often lead to misguided tyranny. Visit the author at TerryBirdgenaw.com.