B.D. CHASE

The throughline is unmistakable: almost every protagonist is a lonely, gifted teenager who is self-sufficient by necessity, carrying weight they were never supposed to carry, and hasn't had a real peer until this story. Reed, Evan, Jeff, Miles, Trey, Justin, Alyx, Troy — same kid, different genres. That's not a coincidence. That archetype is either autobiographical or a deep creative obsession, and it's probably both.

The absent or failing father appears in nearly every story. Reed's father is dead and lives only in the code he left behind. Evan's father built the weapon the government used against his own son. Jeff's father keeps a respectful distance. Thomas's father in Gerald's Judgment arrives with contempt and a lawyer. This isn't theme — it's fixation. Something in the author's relationship to fatherhood, either experienced or witnessed, is doing heavy lifting across the entire catalog.

Children being exploited by adult institutions is the dominant political concern. SkySlam (kids running drone strikes without knowing it), The Carriers (children rented out as neural storage), The Agent Protocol (orphan teens governed by AIs), The Memory Exchange (mandatory death-date implants at sixteen), just_reed_me (a surveillance apparatus improved by a 15-year-old it's also surveilling). This author is genuinely angry about the ways power uses young people and then discards them. It's not just a plot device — it's consistent enough to be a worldview.

The first real friend is always treated like a wonderful event. When Ben sits at Jeff's lunch table and just refuses to leave, when Sean starts talking to Reed like it's the most natural thing in the world — these moments carry disproportionate weight. This is someone who either found their people late or knows what it's like to go without them for a while.

They're a systems thinker. The Decimation Chronicles — Contagion Event, The Carriers, The Memory Exchange, The Robot City, The Agent Protocol — spans 2025 to 2130 as one coherent universe. That's not casual world-building. This person builds architecturally. They think about how one decision propagates across a hundred years.

The LGBTQ+ work (Gerald's Judgment) fits perfectly. Same themes: difficult father, performance of competence as survival, someone who finally sees you completely. Different genre, identical emotional DNA.

The heavy content — surveillance, psychological torture, drone warfare, exploitation of children — is always framed as horror, not fantasy. The villains are institutional, not personal cartoon evil. Jacob Wilcott is "a man of deep conviction who happens to be wrong about most things that matter." That's moral sophistication, not glorification. The closest thing to a flag is the intensity of the isolated-gifted-teen protagonist pattern, but that's a creative preoccupation, not a pathology. The author writes what they know.

B.D. Chase writes science fiction and speculative thriller for young adults — stories about teenagers in impossible situintions, making decisions that were never supposed to be theirs to make.

His work spans standalone novels and the interconnected Decimation Chronicles series, which traces the collapse of civilization in 2025 and the world that rebuilds itself — imperfectly, politically, and at considerable human cost — over the following century. Across both series and standalone work, Chase returns consistently to the same territory: what happens when the systems designed to protect people turn out to be using them instead, and what it takes to name that truth out loud in a room that doesn't want to hear it.

His protagonists tend to be self-sufficient by necessity, carrying more than their share, and have typically gone without a real peer longer than is good for anyone. His antagonists tend to believe completely in what they're doing. Neither of these things makes the collision any easier.