By Fiona Slusarev
Would you notice if society’s most overlooked people began disappearing? How about if they returned, but they were somehow transformed? Who are you, if your memories were never actually yours?
Wellington-based author Jeremy Luna, writing under the pen name Jeremiah Moon, explores these questions and the consequences of engineering memory, identity and consciousness in his five-book psychological science-fiction thriller series, the Quantum Seed Saga.
Luna takes his experiences living many lives, as a 20-year U.S. Navy veteran who lived around the world, a serial entrepreneur and now a teacher, to hold up a critical lens to society through the sci-fi genre.
Five years ago, Luna was in a car crash in a small Oregon town. By a cosmically good stroke of luck, an old Navy buddy he hadn’t seen in years lived in the same town and offered him a place to stay for a few days to recover. Over his stay, Luna realized that his friend was suffering from anxiety and depression from their Navy days — something Luna could relate to. While they had fallen out of touch, both men had separately gone through similar experiences.
After spending three days recovering from the crash and encouraging his friend to seek support, Luna got back to his journey on the road: He was heading to Washington state for a real estate venture. Deciding to stop on the way to pick up something for the office, he passed by an unhoused man as he entered a donut shop.
“He didn’t say anything to me or ask me for anything, and I walked right past him, bought my donuts and walked back out. When I got back to my car, it hit me that he’d become invisible to me the moment my eyes looked past him. And it hit me really hard, because I saw in myself that I was devaluing people,” Luna said.
It dawned on him that he’d gone out of his way to bring donuts and coffee for colleagues he hadn’t even met yet — people he didn’t know any better than the man sitting on the curb. When he went back inside to get donuts and coffee for the man, the seed for his book saga had been planted.
Luna’s fascination with society’s invisible people might have been ignited by a car crash and a donut shop, but it’s something that has grown since that day. He is now prone to noticing the stories of those who reside on the margins of society: the veteran who returned from combat and suffers from mental illness, the individual sitting on a curb experiencing homelessness, the foreigner who doesn’t yet speak the language in a new country.
“It came together into this story of how people who are marginalized and on the outside of social norms become invisible to everyone else,” Luna explained.
Luna published his first book in the saga, The Invisible People, in 2025, which follows Ava Chen as she begins to notice unhoused individuals in her neighborhood mysteriously vanish. Some return, but not quite as they left: Their memories don’t fit and personalities have been altered. Ava uses her past as an investigative journalist to get to the bottom of this puzzle, with the help of a wary police officer. A sinister organization lurks beneath the surface of society as reality begins to fracture.
The second installment, The Entangled, came out in May of this year. Ava and her team are back, along with the insidious organization. Reality is continuing to be muddied with truth and illusion blurring across timelines.
“It’s going to really focus on the whole of society — what’s perceived and what’s real. It wants to make people question what reality is and what sacrifice means. It’s a very human story; it really cuts to the heart of what it means to be human and to truly see people,” Luna explained.
Since the theme of Luna’s writing is so close to his heart, he has committed to donating 10 percent of his book earnings to communities that are often overlooked. His most recent donation was to the Lord’s Place, which aims to break the cycle of homelessness in Palm Beach County.
Luna was also featured as a local author at Barnes & Noble in Wellington, where he had the opportunity to meet fans in his community and sign copies of his newest book. He expects the next installment in his series will be out sometime next summer.
He hopes that his books inspire people to appreciate the fellow humans around them.
“You don’t have to be an overseas prince driving a Lambo, or you can be working at McDonald’s flipping burgers: There’s no difference in human value between those two people,” Luna said.
When he’s not creating methodical outlines for his stories, you can find Luna spending time with his wife and their six-year-old daughter, baking, learning to play the violin or working on his doctoral dissertation.
Visit www.jeremiahmoon.com to learn more about Luna and his book series.
