Lawrence Nault

Author · Filmmaker · Researcher · Policy Writer

Lawrence Nault is a Canadian author, filmmaker, independent researcher, and policy writer rooted in the Alberta Badlands and Rockies. His work spans speculative fiction and young adult fantasy, documentary film, academic research into digital infrastructure and authority, and draft policy proposals across occupational health, technology governance, and environmental policy. He has lived across Canada, and that breadth of place and experience runs through everything he makes.

Before turning to writing and filmmaking full time, Nault built a career that moved between the handmade and the institutional — working as a craftsman in woodworking and architectural blacksmithing, as a farrier, and later in policy, governance, risk management, and technology. That range of experience — physical, analytical, and systemic — shapes the questions his fiction asks about ecology, technology, and what it means to be human.

His fiction includes three series — the adult speculative fiction of the Symbiosis Sequence, the YA fantasy of the Draconim Series, and the middle grade MacIver Kids Adventures — as well as standalone novels, with new titles published several times a year. His documentary film Echoes of a Hermit is available on [REPLACE: streaming platform name], and a second documentary, On Nature and Writing, is currently in production.

As an independent researcher, Nault is the author of the six-part academic series Platforms as Infrastructural Religions: Authority, Visibility, and Algorithmic Power in the Digital Age, published on Zenodo under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. His policy work includes more than twelve draft policy proposals published on Substack, and articles in Canadian Occupational Safety magazine. He is also the host of Stone & Signal, a podcast exploring the intersections of technology, nature, and human meaning, now in its second season.

A note from Lawrence

I have never been interested in writing stories simply to help people escape the world. I write because I want to understand it.

Whether I'm writing about dragons, artificial intelligence, distant worlds, children's adventures, or the politics of data centres, I'm asking the same questions: What does it mean to be human? What do we owe one another? And what kind of future are we quietly building without realizing it?

My fiction, research, and policy work are not separate pursuits. They are different ways of exploring the same landscape. Sometimes a novel can ask a question that an essay cannot. Sometimes research uncovers a truth that fiction can make people feel. Sometimes public policy is simply storytelling with real-world consequences.

The physical landscape matters just as much. Living among the prairies, badlands, forests, and mountains has taught me that civilizations are temporary, but rivers, rocks, and ecosystems measure time differently. Standing in those places has a way of shrinking the certainty of today's headlines while making tomorrow's decisions feel far more important.

Lately, I've been thinking about infrastructure—not just roads, power lines, and data centres, but the invisible systems we build around knowledge, technology, ownership, and democracy. We often celebrate what we create without asking what it asks of us in return. The questions that interest me most are rarely whether we can build something, but whether we should, who benefits if we do, and what we may lose along the way.

I don't expect my books or essays to provide answers. I hope they encourage better questions. If a reader finishes one of my stories looking at the world a little differently than when they began, then the work has done exactly what I hoped it would.

Short bio — for press use

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Lawrence Nault is a Canadian author, filmmaker, and independent researcher rooted in the Alberta Badlands and Rockies. He writes speculative fiction and YA fantasy, directs documentary film, hosts the podcast Stone & Signal, and publishes academic research and policy proposals on digital infrastructure, occupational health, and environmental governance. His work asks hard questions about ecology, technology, and what it means to be human.

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