Maggie Blackbird

Today, author Christine Hart is guesting. She’s talking about her latest trilogy release, The Variant Conspiracy, a sci-fi romance. Don’t forget to enter the Rafflecopter giveaway.

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The foundation of The Variant Conspiracy trilogy is the question, “What if the men destroying our world were doing it on purpose?”

In 2012* when I started the series, I had just become a mother for the first time. To me, the world looked and felt like it was headed in the right direction. Yet I still saw a geopolitical landscape rife with pollution and corporate greed. I felt compelled to come up with a scenario that explained away some of the awfulness driving climate change. What if ‘they’ actually WANT our environment to deteriorate? What if that’s the end goal?

I grew up reading John Wyndham books and as a teen I was fascinated by television like Twin Peaks and The X-Files. When it came to creating a series of my own, I was also heavily influenced by the paranormal, dystopian, and science fiction stories coming out at that time. I loved the X-Men movies. I read and watched The Hunger Games, Divergent, and Twilight books and movies, not just because they were popular, but until The Variant Conspiracy, I had written YA standalones almost exclusively. I consumed YA stories to help me understand the YA market. And when I strayed from YA, I was writing and drawing picture books. As much as I love writing for children and being a part of a new generation falling in love with reading, I wanted to create a story that let my dark side loose a bit.

I developed The Variant Conspiracy as NA books because I knew the story was going to get mature in places, and that my characters were going on a journey that simply wasn’t accessible (in a believable way) to YA ages. I needed Irina to be old enough to work in a corporate environment full-time. At least, in the beginning.

There is also the romance element of the story. Which I established early on in the first book. But when I found a home for the series at Soul Mate Publishing, I knew a romance publisher would want that part of the books to be prominent. I included as much romance for primary, secondary, and even tertiary characters as I could, not just because my publisher at the time wanted that, but because it’s something I enjoy as a reader too.

I also mined my travels and personal experiences for the settings. I wouldn’t use the term world-building. The stories have a magic realism element of existing in our time and place, but where a mutant sub-culture lies hidden from mainstream society.

When I wrote Victoria and Vancouver Island, BC’s Lower Mainland, Seattle, Spokane, London, Chester, and Nairobi, I drew on places I’d lived or visited. I wanted to write what I knew, as much as a person can in a paranormal/sci-fi story.

*It’s worth mentioning that the current release of The Variant Conspiracy is a second edition for the trilogy.

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What if the men destroying our world were doing it on purpose? The Variant Conspiracy trilogy follows 19-year-old Irina Proffer as she connects the dots between her cryptic employer’s work and an international plot to transform Earth. All while she navigates love and grief, both for the first time.

As Irina comes of age within a subculture of human mutation, she and her friends hunt a group of corporate eco-saboteurs. They discover a singular ancient evil that wants nothing more than to wipe out all life and remake our planet. As Irina pieces together visions of the future, she must figure out a way to change an outcome that seems ‌inevitable.

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Title: In Irina’s Cards
Series: The Variant Conspiracy, book one
Author: Christine Hart
Genre: Sci-Fi Romance
Length: 280 pages
Release Date: March 28, 2025

Blurb: Irina Proffer leaves mundane small-town life behind when she experiences visions inspired by a strange deck of tarot cards. To get answers, she travels from her northern British Columbia home to the province’s coastal capital. She quickly discovers a world of fringe genetic science and supernatural mystery.

Working for Innoviro Industries, Irina is drawn in by a powerful first love and compelling, yet dangerous questions about the nature of the company’s business. Meeting other ‘variants’ brings Irina closer and closer to the dark truth about her origins. She finds herself at the heart of two overlapping love triangles as she scrambles to escape her employer’s grip.

Before she leaves the city, Irina realizes she has merely scratched the surface of a frightening conspiracy on a global scale.

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We walked a bit farther in silence. I had assumed Jonah would find something, at least a mention of the drug, within the files at Innoviro. How could something either guarded or fresh out of the lab, be a trustworthy substance I should let them inject into my veins? Even if Ivan showed me charts and research findings, what insight could I gain from them?

Jonah and I rounded a corner. The path diverged around a ring of shrubs and a large arbutus tree. On the one side, the path jutted out to a viewpoint looking over to the Inner Harbour. On the other, a bench sat tucked into a semicircle of overgrown juniper bushes. The sun had nearly dropped behind the hills in Esquimalt, casting vivid yellow-orange light onto downtown. Bright pink clouds floated like cotton candy in the sky. If we kept going the Harbour would greet us in its gown of twinkling lights. My sunroom balcony had that view at every sunset. I turned towards the bench. I suddenly felt like I needed a break.

Jonah sat down next to me. He touched the side of my mouth and I jumped.

“Sorry; you had some ice cream …” he said sheepishly.

I wished I was the kind of girl who carried a mirror in my purse, but I knew better than to bother searching. I looked out at the ocean and the pink pieces of light floating on the water.

“You look tense.”

His arm slipped behind my back as I kept staring ahead. I turned to answer and found myself nose-to-nose with him.

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Title: The Compendium
Series: The Variant Conspiracy, book two
Author: Christine Hart
Genre: Sci-Fi Romance
Length: 276 pages
Release Date: March 28, 2025

Blurb: Irina and her renegade variant friends are scrambling to pick up the trail of their former employer, Ivan, and his globally catastrophic scheme. After strategically sharing their story with the media, the group heads south from Vancouver to Seattle hoping to recruit more experienced – and lethal – variants to their cause.

Their attention develops a laser focus on an engineered disaster mere days ahead of them. Ivan is using what staff and resources remain of Innoviro Industries to set off a violent earthquake in San Francisco. While they fight to stop the earthquake, Irina pushes the love of her life Jonah as far away as she can, trying to keep his unstable genetic degradation in check.

Irina’s friends think they’ve seen the worst that Innoviro could bring forth by the time they reach a secret facility in the Mojave Desert. As they near the property, the group uncovers a horror none of them had ever imagined.

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I turned from the dirty basins to the three desks in the corner. The laminate-coated fiberboard frames of each workstation had only cables protruding from holes in the surface. Phones and computers had been here but yanked out unceremoniously along with the plants when the previous tenants left.

One desk held a few papers. A brochure for pizza and a real estate notepad. Another had a pen. A personal possession! I picked it up.

The room around me flickered and the basins were full of plants again, under hanging fluorescent lights. Slender aluminum tubes reached up over the basin edges like large insect arms. A bell jingled off to my left and a fine mist burst out of the arms in unison.

I walked up to one of the basins full of tiny lush bluish ferns. A small plastic label in the dirt declared RESISTANT STRAND 122B. Farther down the line, I could see a kind of evergreen seedling.

As I got closer to the evergreens, I saw glints of red in the spiky leaves and tiny spindly pods on the branches. Flies buzzed around the plants and I saw one of the pods open like a glistening green mouth. A fly landed inside and the mouth snapped shut. I shuddered as I contemplated the size those little mouths could become if they grew proportionate to the rest of the tree.

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Title: Terra Nova
Series: The Variant Conspiracy, book three
Author: Christine Hart
Genre: Sci-Fi Romance
Length: 308 pages
Release Date: March 28, 2025

Blurb: The end of humanity and an unrecognizable future Earth are now days away. After their first glimpse of the Terra Nova virus, Irina and her variant friends know their former employer’s plans are almost at hand. Their failed attempt to publicize Ivan and Innoviro Industries’ horrific activities has left them utterly reliant on their own wits and weapons.

After surviving a catastrophic earthquake in San Francisco and destroying a secret viral testing facility, Irina’s crew has traveled by a variant portal to London. On the other side of the world, they begin tracking when and where Terra Nova will be unleashed on the world. They know stopping Terra Nova is only the beginning of unraveling Ivan’s plans to reinvent the planet, but if they can’t stop this virus, there will be no one left to save.

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I surveyed the dark London alley, its air heavy with odors of fat and fuel. Go-go boys gyrated in the window of a dance club across the adjacent street. Club music reverberated off the buildings around me while I pulled my boyfriend Jonah through an interspatial portal.

“Welcome to Soho,” I said.

Our former co-worker Melissa gave him a half smile. Jonah rubbed his arctic blue eyes. In the dark alley, his black hair glistened like wet ink. He stood tall beside me, gripping my shoulders protectively as though he didn’t trust our surroundings. I still smelled the dust of the Mojave Desert and the soot from the trailer fire on his damp T-shirt.

“Wild. We’re really in London.” He smiled down at me. “What is Soho?”

“It used to be the red-light district.” Melissa unzipped and stepped out of her dusty dirt-biking pants. She discarded them in the back corner of the alley. Her remaining clothes were a simple white waffle shirt and denim shorts. She unraveled her disheveled hair and re-wound her bun carefully.

“That’s why Evonatura chose it. You can have an interesting cast of characters like variants and all their weird and wonderful talents in this neighborhood without standing out too much.”

My friend Faith stepped through the portal and nearly bumped into Jonah. She stumbled forward. Her purple dreadlocks picked up a shaft of electric blue from a black light across the street.

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Christine Hart is a writer of speculative fiction for youth and adults. She also runs an online metalsmithing shop, Hart Fabrications. 

Christine’s backlist includes YA, NA, and MG titles. Her first collection of adult fiction, Weird Stories of Strange Women, is coming in 2026.

When not writing, she creates wearable art from recycled metals, vintage glass, and unusual gemstones. She shares her eclectic home with her husband and two children.

Learn more about Christine and her work at hart-fabrications.com and christine-hart.ca.

Follow Christine: Bluesky | Instagram | TikTok | Amazon

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