Richard Ellis Preston Jr Books in Order

Richard Ellis Preston Jr was born in Los Angeles in 1963, and his own telling of that beginning is earthy and funny, full of Valley smog, family life, and quick snapshots of childhood. He started in Southern California, but he did not stay in one place for long. That slightly restless opening fits the career that followed.

Stories were the thing that stayed put.

Preston spent parts of childhood in Honolulu and Edmonton before the family eventually landed in Waterloo, Ontario, where he was largely raised. His father taught geography at the University of Waterloo, so campus life was familiar early. He later studied English there himself and remembered movie screenings, long library sessions during blizzards, and the ordinary chaos of student life.

By the time he finished at Waterloo, he had also, as he jokes, finished his hockey career. What he did not have was a neat plan. In later reflections he has been very open about drifting through possible futures until he finally accepted that writing was not just an interest, it was the thing he had to do if he wanted to be happy.

After university he kept moving. He studied Radio and Television Broadcasting at Algonquin College in Ottawa, worked as a CBC news cameraman and freelance cameraman, and then won a talent scholarship for a year in York University's film program. He was learning craft, but also circling closer to storytelling.

Then he went looking for a more creative life.

A backpacking trip through England, Scotland, and Wales helped clarify that. Preston returned and moved to Los Angeles to chase screenwriting, worked as a script reader at Universal, found representation, and spent years writing film scripts and television episodes. He has said his work reached outlets such as HBO, USA, TNT, Animal Planet, and Fox Kids, even while regular day jobs helped keep life afloat.

The turn to novels came after burnout. While researching an enormous World War II story set in Russia, he needed a break from the heaviness and wrote a steampunk adventure instead. That detour became Romulus Buckle & the City of the Founders, followed by Romulus Buckle & the Engines of War, the prequel An Officer and a Gentleman, and Romulus Buckle and the Luminiferous Aether. Those books mix post-apocalyptic California, alien aftermath, steam-powered warfare, and old-fashioned swashbuckling. Readers who warm to them usually do so for the airships, the oversized action, and the patched-together family at the center.

He has not stayed with one mode of fiction. The League of the Sphinx heads into a World War II adventure with teenagers, Egyptian magic, ghosts, and Nazis, while Memories and Imaginings shows a quieter, more personal side in poetry. Across the work, though, a few interests keep coming back: history, loyalty, found families, young people under pressure, and big worlds built out of careful detail and unapologetic adventure. He likes stories that move.

Preston also does the homework. For his Russia project, later known as The White Rose of Stalingrad, he traveled there in 2007 to visit museums and battlefields and speak with surviving veterans. These days he lives in California with his wife and two daughters, and he has written about carrying on as an independent author. It suits a writer whose path has always looked more homemade than prepackaged.