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DARK FUTURE
Jack Specter in a cobalt suit, bewildered in Manhattan while masked pedestrians look at their phones beneath an amber sky.

A science-fiction novel

DARK
FUTURE

J. M. DeMatteis

He imagined a better future.
Then he arrived in 2023.

From the Eisner Award–winning writer.

California · June 1963

A story.
Without
an ending.

Jack Specter makes his living imagining other worlds. His television series, The Third Eye, finds wonder and terror beneath the surface of ordinary life.

But his wife is dead. His five-year-old daughter is living with her powerful grandparents. And the memories of a city he helped burn during the war will not leave him alone.

Then an old friend calls with an invitation.

Jack sits at his typewriter in a quiet 1963 house, an empty chair beside him.

The Olduvai project

Science has
reached
its limit.

Deep underground, Dr. Elijah Carter studies an object that looks like an ordinary piece of black stone. It has already done extraordinary things to the people who approached it.

Now the project is turning to artists, writers and dreamers. People whose imaginations might take them where intellect cannot.

The Relic has asked for Jack by name.

Jack and the imposing Dr. Elijah Carter examine a small black stone on a pedestal in the underground laboratory.

New York · 2023

He is 39.
His daughter
is 65.

Jack arrives in a city choked with smoke, in a century that has failed every hope he once held for it.

But Crosby is still alive. The little girl he remembers has lived an entire life without him.

Finding her is one thing. Answering for his absence is another.

Jack faces his daughter Crosby in her hotel suite. She is now an older woman, guarded and unwilling to embrace him.
A tiny Jack Specter suspended within a vast, fractured cosmic lattice of light.

For film
and television

A father’s search.
A world’s future.

In 1963, grieving TV writer Jack Specter is hurled sixty years into a dying 2023, where he searches for the grown daughter stolen from his life and confronts a cosmic entity whose power may let him rewrite both his past and humanity’s future.

For film and television

Time travel.
Human stakes.

  • One man. Two eras. One impossible choice.

    A grieving 1963 TV writer enters a smoke-choked 2023—and faces the possibility of giving humanity a different ending.

  • A father–daughter story across time.

    A daughter older than her father grounds the cosmic stakes in love, guilt and forgiveness.

  • Imagination as the ultimate technology.

    A secret Cold War project recruits artists to commune with an impossible relic, fusing science, creativity and cosmic mystery.

  • Feature film or premium limited series.

    A central dramatic role spanning period America, contemporary dread and a metaphysical universe.

Clara appears at three ages in the same room: a girl with a View-Master, a young woman and an elderly woman.
Dark Future by J. M. DeMatteis: the original book cover in orange, yellow, blue and black.

Read the book

Read
the book.

Can a writer rewrite the past?

A short science-fiction novel about a grieving father, a secret experiment and the possibility of imagining a different world.

From the television studios of the 1960s to a bewildering future, Jack Specter’s search for his daughter becomes a journey through memory, responsibility and the nature of creation itself.

Read the book

About the author

J. M.
DeMatteis

Eisner Award winner J. M. DeMatteis was a professional musician and rock music journalist before launching a long career writing comic books, novels, television and film.

A flowering lilac bush stands beneath a pool of light in an austere underground chamber.