I wanted to spend the months it takes to write a book in a happier head space. I’d also just come off a really difficult year of caring for my elderly parents and experiencing their deaths. I’d just finished my adult urban fantasy trilogy, “California Bones,” and I was thinking about what to write next. It gives me a deep sense of comfort to see good dogs. Q: What was your inspiration for the book?Ī: I’m one of those people who spend possibly too much time looking at dog pictures on the Internet. In San Diego, he lives with his wife, who is an astronomy and physics professor, and their two dogs. His other books include 2014’s “California Bones,” the first part of a fantasy trilogy for adults. Raised in Los Angeles and a graduate of UCLA, Van Eekhout published his first novel, “Norse Code,” in 2009.

The book is written for the 8-to-12 age group. The adventures begin when the dogs accompany their human counterparts on a space voyage to install a new outpost far, far across the galaxy. So much so that his new book, “Voyage of the Dogs,” is centered on four of them. (Oct.San Diego writer Greg van Eekhout likes dogs. Beneath the entertaining, madcap shenanigans, van Eekhout’s story raises intriguing questions about free will, fulfilling one’s life purpose, and hard-won judgment. Under the tutelage of kind uniMIND scientist Gina, Cog learns to learn from his mistakes on his first visit to a grocery store, he fills two carts with a humorous overabundance of goods and, when directed to return most items to the shelves, discovers that “unshopping takes longer than shopping.” After an attempt to “learn by making mistakes” lands him in the hands of villainous uniMIND staffers, and Gina is reassigned elsewhere, Cog and four robot accomplices (his long-lost sister, a dog, a car, and a waste-consuming “Trashbot”) use their varied technological skills to find Gina and rebel against the despotic corporation. Created by uniMIND, a greedy company whose technology aims to control the actions of robotic and living creatures, Cog is programmed to learn and to share his knowledge, often in comically literal robot-speak (“I live in a room with a bed where I lie down. This creatively layered novel by the author of Voyage of the Dogs centers on a robot named Cog (short for “cognitive development”), built to resemble a 12-year-old boy.

Voyage of the Dogs by Greg Van Eekhout