Crisis in Zefra

In spring 2005, the Directorate of Land Strategic Concepts of National Defense Canada (that is to say, the army) hired me to write a dramatized future military scenario.  The book-length work, Crisis in Zefra, was set in a mythical African city-state, about 20 years in the future, and concerned a group of Canadian peacekeepers who are trying to ready the city for its first democratic vote while fighting an insurgency.  Both the peacekeepers and the insurgents use a range of new technologies, some fantastic-sounding, but all in development in 2005.  Needless to say, the good guys win, but not without consequences; the document explores everything from the evolution of individual soldiers' kits to strategic considerations in world of pervasive instant communications.  The project ran to 27,000 words and was published by the army as a bound paperback book.

If you'd like to read Crisis in Zefra, you can download it in PDF form.

CBC's The Hour, Harper's Magazine weigh in

On January 3, 2007 I was interviewed by George Strombolopolous for CBC television's The Hour about Zefra and the future of war.  You can watch the interview at CBC's website.

 Harper's magazine excerpted Crisis in Zefra in their July, 2007 issue. I savoured the irony--after all, I have a Mennonite background, so the fact that the project I seem to be most known for is a military one is, well, ironic. Also, it's practically every writer's dream to get a book excerpted in Harper's, and some of us lie awake nights wondering how we'll accomplish it; so the fact that it was this one, which, as I was writing it, I'd thought of as having a specialized and ultimately tiny audience ... yeah, ironic.

Montreal newspaper La Presse did an article about Zefra and myself.