FX Holden Books in Order

If you want the main entry point: Bering Strait → Okinawa → Orbital
If you want the story chronology: Kobani → Golan → Bering Strait → Okinawa
If you want the sharpest military flashpoints: Pagasa → DMZ
If you want AI-driven suspense: Deep Core → Core Drift → Core Melt

FX Holden is the thriller pen name of Australian writer Tim Slee, a former journalist and intelligence officer whose fiction blends geopolitics, future tech, and ordinary people having very extraordinary days. He was born in Papua New Guinea to Australian parents, with family roots in the sheep country of South Australia.

Before novels took over, Slee worked as a journalist in Adelaide and later held government roles in Canberra and Sydney. That mix of reporting, policy work, and intelligence experience helps explain why his books care so much about systems, chain of command, and the way big decisions land on individual lives.

He did not come to fiction by the usual straight line.

Under his own name, he built a broad writing career first. He won the Allen and Unwin INK Prize for short fiction, later took the BookLife Prize for his science fiction fantasy novel The Vanirim, and won the Banjo Prize for Taking Tom Murray Home. That novel showed a very different side of his work, more grounded in Australian life and character than in missiles, drones, or orbital warfare.

The FX Holden side of the story grew out of impatience as much as ambition. While waiting through the slow machinery of traditional publishing, he taught himself how to publish independently and released Bering Strait, a near-future military thriller about a US-Russia crisis in the Arctic. It found readers fast and opened the door to a long run of Future War novels, including Okinawa, Kobani, Orbital, Golan, Pagasa, and DMZ.

Those books usually start with a real-world pressure point and then push it just far enough into the future to feel alarming, but possible. A treaty, a blockade, a cyberattack, a contested island, a militarized orbit. Readers who click with Holden tend to like the same combination: plausible hardware, lots of moving parts, multiple points of view, and characters who have to make decisions before anyone fully understands the battlefield.

He also writes a quieter kind of science fiction.

The Coruscant novels, Deep Core, Core Drift, and Core Melt, lean more toward suspense and sci-fi noir. They explore artificial intelligence, cybernetic humans, surveillance, political control, and the simple but thorny question of who gets treated as fully human once the machines start thinking back. They are less about giant battles, more about pressure, pursuit, and moral gray areas.

A lot of his fiction seems to come from curiosity. He has said that ideas often begin with news stories, geopolitical questions, and the places he has lived and worked. He has spent time in Australia, Canada, and Denmark, and has described Australia as his physical and emotional home base, even when work takes him elsewhere.

That background matters. Holden writes about war, AI, and state power, but he keeps bringing the focus back to pilots, sailors, analysts, tech workers, and civilians who get caught inside those larger machines. The result is a body of work that can move from Taking Tom Murray Home to Kobani to Deep Core without feeling scattered, because in each case he is interested in people first, and the forces closing in around them second.