Cook was born in Billericay in Essex, England in 1956.[1] After spending his early childhood in England, in 1962 he moved to Ocean Island (now known as Banaba) in Kiribati.[2] His experiences of English castles and of life on an equatorial island influenced his writing.[3] In 1964, he moved to New Zealand, where he was educated. He later joined the New Zealand Army as a medic, where he served for ten years, reaching the rank of sergeant.[2]
Cook's first novel, Plague Summer, was published in 1980, when he was 24. It concerned drug running in New Zealand during an outbreak of foot and mouth disease. He left the army to write, and published The Shift in 1986.[2] That comic science fiction novel involved an alien invasion and a machine that altered human history. Under the title After Advent, it was a finalist in the 1985 Young Writers' Competition run by The Times and Jonathan Cape.[1][4]
Between 1986 and 1992, Cook wrote the ten-novel series Chronicles of an Age of Darkness. Disappointing sales prevented the publication of further volumes (up to 60 were planned)[2] and Cook stopped publishing for some time.
In 1997, he moved to Japan, and lived in Yokohama with his wife and daughter, where he taught English. Between 1998 and 2005, he published mainly through his website, Zen Virus. His online works encompassed poetry, short stories, flash fiction, and several novels, including To Find and Wake the Dreamer and Oceans of Light, a trilogy.[2]
In 2005, he underwent chemotherapy and radiation treatment for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. He wrote a medical memoir, Cancer Patient, recounting that experience.[2] Following a relapse, he died on 8 November 2008, in a hospice in Auckland.
The series broadly tells the story of the events leading to the end of a dark age in a fantasy world. The idea for the series began with an outline for a series of twenty novels. This would have been followed by two equally long series, The Chronicles of an Age of Wrath, and The Chronicles of an Age of Heroes. This sixty-volume scheme ended with the publication of the tenth volume because of disappointing sales.[2]
Other novels
Plague Summer
The Shift
This describes a postnuclear world where orange intelligent reptilian extraterrestrials known as the Spang have conquered the Earth through the use of a device called the Shift, which controls movement through space and time and can alter history. They are in league with Iridian Troy, the most powerful human on Earth, who has an overprotective attitude towards his daughter. He is opposed by his guilt-ridden over-intellectual employee Gabriel Arkhangel and his daughter's lover Clive Sendarka, whom he pursues using all the resources available to the human race. Humans are regularly exported to a slave colony known as Deep Six, which is far out in interstellar space.
Oceans of Light series
West of Heaven
East of Hell
North of Paradise
A fantasy trilogy that Cook finished in the 1990s, set in the fantasy realm of Chalakanesia.
To Find and Wake the Dreamer
A fantasy novel about the War on Terror. In the city state of Oolong Morblock, where a certain proportion of the people have a natural ability to cause themselves to explode, in effect making them potential suicide bombers, Ibrahim Chess tries to find the middle road: to steer a course of moderation and sanity in a world which is going mad, and where the civil peace is threatened by the increasingly intolerant fanaticism of the conflict between the minority group to which Ibrahim belongs, the astrals, and the city state's dominant group, the norms. Published in 2005.
Bamboo Horses
A murder mystery with fantasy elements set in the land of Nizon, where people eat with scissors rather than with chopsticks. Fantasy in a modern environment complete with computers and cellphones. Business manager Ken Udamana, a husband and a father of two, believes that someone is planning to murder him and takes a shot at find out who. This novel contains some violence and touches on the subject of an adulterous relationship.
