PHOTO: Scott Coon, speculative fiction author and U.S. Army veteran, whose stories span galaxies and challenge the limits of human understanding.
Award-Winning Author Merges Military Insight With Sci-Fi Spectacle
Scott Coon draws from military intelligence, software development, and a love of storytelling to craft speculative fiction that challenges perceptions, explores the afterlife, and inspires fellow creatives.
Scott Coon writes with a mind sharpened by years of military discipline and an imagination untethered by convention. A former U.S. Army Intelligence Analyst and now a software developer, Coon’s dual background fuels a rare kind of speculative fiction—one that marries technical precision with philosophical weight. Whether set on distant asteroids or in surreal afterlives, his stories ask what it means to live, to question, and ultimately, to believe in something beyond ourselves.
In Godless Armageddon, he crafts a cosmos beyond death—alien, metaphysical, and intellectually daring. Rather than recycling familiar tropes, Coon challenges our assumptions with an afterlife built on the strangeness of the invisible universe, drawing from both scientific theory and personal spiritual inquiry. It’s a story rooted not only in spectacle but in introspection, each page echoing with the quiet tension between belief and disbelief.
His debut novel, Lost Helix, balances that same thoughtfulness with action and mystery, a tale of a boy, a dream, and the power of music amid corporate dystopia. Like much of his work, it’s a narrative shaped by insider knowledge—of surveillance, of control, of escape—and driven by emotional authenticity. Coon doesn’t just tell stories; he constructs living systems, richly layered and unapologetically human.
A tireless advocate for the writing community, Scott Coon shares not only his fiction but his insight. Through critique groups, his YouTube channel, and his Little Creative Interview series, he champions other creatives with the same integrity that guides his own work—always thoughtful, always bold, always reaching for more than just the expected.
How did your military background as a U.S. Army Intelligence Analyst influence the world-building and themes in Godless Armageddon and Lost Helix?
I often draw upon my experience as a U.S. Army Electronic Warfare Signals Intelligence Analyst for my work. In Lost Helix, corporate agents come after DJ for evidence that he doesn’t even know he has; the agents are militarized and use intelligence gathering techniques to track him down.
In the opening scene of Godless Armageddon, we get to know the characters before they all die, and then the story truly starts. In that opening, you experience the Rangers storming Pointe Du Hoc during the Normandy invasion of World War II. In addition to my own military experience, I used the After-Action Reports of the actual attack to make this authentic. Though I did condense and fictionalize events for the reader.
Godless Armageddon explores a surreal and chaotic afterlife—what inspired this vision, and how did you approach balancing the abstract with relatable character arcs?
I’ve long been intrigued by the invisible universe, particles and waves passing through our bodies without us knowing, and all only recently discovered by science.
How much more of the invisible universe remains undetected?
I’ve also been perpetually disappointed in the depiction of the afterlife in almost every work of fiction, mythology, and religion that I’ve ever read. They’re all just Earth—Dante, Valhalla, the Egyptian Afterlife, The Good Place, etc. And only Bill and Ted left room for aliens in the afterlife.
So, from a thought experiment, I created an invisible afterlife wrapped around the Earth, one that could exist in our universe, leaving room for aliens, ghosts, all religions, and Armageddon.
Conveying this world in an easy to grasp, engaging narrative took years of editing and a great deal of help from my writers’ groups. I can’t thank them enough.
In Lost Helix, music plays a pivotal role in the narrative. What is your own relationship with music, and why did you choose it as a central motif?
I never had the chance to learn an instrument as a kid, and I never took the time as an adult. But I love music, and I’m proud that my library contains albums from every major genre and from every decade back to the beginning of recorded music, as well as classical and opera. I gave DJ my love of music but also music lessons and a dream to not be an asteroid miner.
Your work spans across short stories, novels, and anthologies—how does your creative process differ when writing a standalone short story versus a full-length novel?
For a short story you must bring the wider world and required subplots into the story in a concentrated way that still provides the depth the story needs. In a novel, you need to conceive of a story that naturally fills the breadth of the book. Subplots and descriptions have more room to breathe, but the main plot must be ever present.
A short story requires a concentrated period of focus, usually taking about three months from brainstorming to completely reviewed by writers’ groups. A novel takes at least two years to complete those same steps—Godless Armageddon took five years.
Many of your stories tackle complex moral and philosophical questions. Do you aim to challenge readers’ worldviews, or are these themes a natural outcome of your storytelling?
I try to tell an entertaining story built on compelling characters, a strong plot, and spectacle…lots of spectacle. After a spiritual journey in my youth, I became an atheist and a Taoist. I’ve also been a student of history and literature. With all that within me, it’s only natural that it would pour onto the page whether I intended it or not.
As someone who shares advice through critique groups, events, and your YouTube channel, what common pitfalls do you see new science fiction and fantasy writers fall into?
The most important issue across all fiction, including science fiction and fantasy, is the depiction of torture as a way to gather useful intelligence. It has caused people to believe that torture is effective and that’s a dangerous misunderstanding. The truth is that a person will lie to make the torture stop. The true purpose of torture is to get people to admit to things regardless of the truth. Good guys don’t use torture because the good guys don’t want lies. So, please, write responsibly.
Can you tell us more about your Little Creative Interview series and what you’ve learned from hosting conversations with other creatives?
To share knowledge and encourage creativity, I developed The Little Create Interview, five little questions with a lot of potential. From it I’ve learned that every approach to storytelling is unique, and every path to publication is as well.
What advice would you give to aspiring authors looking to weave personal experience, such as military or technical knowledge, into speculative fiction?
They say, write what you know; so, I say, know more. Be curious. Gather knowledge about everything. Learn the history they don’t teach you in school. The more you know about the world, history, government, psychology, and so on, the more you will have to draw upon when creating captivating narratives with depth and meaning.
