Sean Gaskins

Sean Gaskins is the author of Beneath the Iron Cross, a historical alternate-history novel developed over the course of more than six years.

The project began in 2019 and changed considerably as Sean returned to it over the years. What started as an idea eventually became a much larger story about occupation, survival, loyalty, fear, and the choices ordinary people make when the world around them stops being ordinary.

Rather than focusing only on battles, generals, and the movements of armies, Beneath the Iron Cross was written to explore what happens after the fighting reaches the people who never asked to be part of it. Shopkeepers still have to open their doors. Families still have to eat. People still fall in love, betray each other, disappear, cooperate, resist, and try to convince themselves that tomorrow will somehow be normal.

Sean spent years researching the real locations, photographs, streets, institutions, military structures, and everyday details that shaped the world of the novel. The history surrounding the story is real wherever possible. The occupation and the events of the novel are fictional, but the world they inhabit was built to feel as though they could have happened.

Before publishing his first novel, Sean served in the United States Marine Corps as a Military Police Officer. That experience influenced the way authority, investigations, reports, detention, command structures, and the consequences of decisions are portrayed throughout the book. It also reinforced something central to the story: institutions are ultimately made up of individuals, and individuals do not always behave the way a uniform, title, or ideology says they should.

Outside of writing, Sean is the founder of Brink Industries & Development, where his work has centered on technology, web development, software, artificial intelligence, and building independent projects from the ground up. Writing has remained the unusually stubborn exception among those projects. No matter how many times Beneath the Iron Cross was put aside, it kept coming back.

Sean lives in Jacksonville, Florida.

Beneath the Iron Cross is the first planned entry in a larger story. Future books will depend on the reception of the first, rather than being advertised as finished novels that do not yet exist. For now, the story begins here.

Things I will actually talk about

• Why start after the war is already lost
• Writing occupied Washington without turning it into a video game
• Six years of returning to one manuscript
• Lukas Hale as a watchmaker, not a commando
• Vox Libertatis and what resistance actually costs
• Operation Phoenix and bureaucratic violence
• Using public archives of 1940s Washington
• Publishing this myself from Florida
• Whether there will be a second book
• What alternate history can still say that straight history cannot

Press, booksellers, clubs: seangaskinswork@gmail.com