Robert Cade Thompson · Author & Field Naturalist
A naturalist who
writes worlds.
YA fantasy and science fiction built out of real field work. I film wild places, then write the ones that don’t exist — magic that behaves like botany, underground cities that obey geology, and monsters with an ecology.
- 3 novels
- Echo Island · 5-part series
- Subterrania · a trilogy
- Also on Audible
Get The Belrose Journals free
A lost botanist’s field journal from the Amazon, 1924. Eight entries, three illustrated plates. It ends the night he walks into Echo Island.
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The shelf · two series, three books
Start with a box a boy was told not to open.
Both series stand alone at book one. Echo Island is Celtic folklore and invented botany; Subterrania is a mile underground and considerably meaner. Kindle editions are the cheap way in.
Echo Island · Book One
The Clan Games
A masked thief hands fifteen-year-old Calum O’Brian a wooden box and tells him not to open it. Behind the Great Wall the Ten Clans have held their own progress back for three hundred years — and the box is an invitation from something that isn’t human.
Subterrania · Book One
Subterrania
Humanity fled underground seven hundred years ago. Quin is sixteen and cannot stop going down tunnels she was told to stay out of. A secret order recruits her for exactly that flaw — and within a month she’s lost an arm, gained an illegal robot, and learned that everything her people believe about the enemy is a lie.
Echo Island · Book Two
Fall of the Ten Clans
Four clans have fallen in four daring moves and declared themselves a new nation. Calum goes over the wall after a people who may not want to be found. His best friend is on the other side — and doesn’t know it yet.
Out now. Free on Kindle Unlimited. The free prequel ends where it begins.
Readers · five stars on Amazon
★★★★★
“Super exciting, twisty, unique story, very well written… I will seek out other works by this author.”
★★★★★
“I kept saying ‘just one more chapter,’ and suddenly it was 2 a.m.”
★★★★★
“I’m always on the lookout for a good fantasy book and I love this. I’m really excited for book 2!”
Free for readers · not published anywhere else
The Belrose Journals
Henry Belrose is a botanist sent into the Amazon in 1924 to find a missing man. He catalogues everything he sees, right up until the world stops being the one he left.
He is not a side character. Henry is a main character in Fall of the Ten Clans, and the journal stops exactly where the novel starts. Every specimen in these plates turns up in the book.
Eight entries. Three illustrated plates. Yours free.
PDF and EPUB, sent straight to your inbox. Plus field notes, and first word on book three.
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Field notes · the blog
What I find outside usually ends up in a book.
Two years of looking closely at small things and writing down what they turn out to mean. This is where the research for the novels actually happens.
Life from a Rotting Log
What a swamp-soaked piece of wood can teach you about resilience. Forty bug bites and a sinus infection later — why feeling unproductive is sometimes the first step to growing something.
An Opera House in the Jungle
First summer break as a middle school teacher, dropped into a strangely quiet writer’s limbo. Set goals, write, edit, write, fall down a research rabbit hole.
Navigating Life’s Ambush Predators
The water splashes, the boat rocks, and you’re scrambling. That’s what writing a novel is like. Honestly, it’s what life is like too.
The same work, on video. Cinematic field essays, short nature documentaries, and the occasional look behind the writing. The swamp footage is research for the books — it just happens to also be the channel.
Watch on YouTube All field notesThe author
I teach the exact age group I write for.
Seventh grade gifted ELA and eighth grade English 1, in Florence, South Carolina. Which means every book gets field-tested on actual thirteen-year-olds — I can watch, in real time, the page where they lean in and the page where they check out. Most authors pay for that kind of feedback and get worse data.
Before the classroom I guided hikes at a fitness resort in southern Utah and took a BA in English with a creative writing emphasis from Utah Tech. The writing itself started with a small ritual: audiobooks with my wife Maryn before bed, night after night, until listening stopped being enough.
I founded and run my school’s robotics club — about thirty students now — and spend most of what’s left of the week outdoors with a camera, which is where the plants in these books come from.
The longer version- WritesYA fantasy & science fiction
- SeriesEcho Island (5 planned) · Subterrania (trilogy)
- Day jobMiddle school ELA, Florence School District One
- FoundedA 30-student robotics club
- DegreeBA English, Creative Writing — Utah Tech
- LivesSouth Carolina, near enough to the swamp
- FilmsWildlife and field essays, badly lit, on purpose