Steve Hawk is a veteran surf writer who harbors a complicated fascination with nuclear warfare. His father was an American pilot in WWII who likely wouldn’t have survived the impending land invasion of Japan had a nuclear bomb not abruptly ended the war. So, even as a child, it dawned on Steve that, without the bomb’s horrific destruction, he — and his brother Tony, yes, the skateboarder — likely wouldn’t have been born. Steve wouldn’t have been the editor of SURFER in the 1990s, and Tony’s landmark 900 in 1999 would’ve probably gotten pushed into the 21st century.
Hawk drew on his obsession with the nefarious, self-righteous nature of men who wield nuclear weapons, weaving it together with his experiences as a writer in Silicon Valley and as part of the rugged surf communities on the Northern California coast. The result is his debut novel, Nearshore (out August 18, available for pre-order now). The story follows a surfer/lifeguard protagonist who, alongside a Stanford doctoral student, unearths a nuclear terrorist conspiracy that leads back to a power-hungry Bay Area tech billionaire.
While a fictional story, it touches on themes that Hawk finds relevant in today’s geopolitical and technological landscape.
“I’m increasingly pessimistic about the future of the world when it comes to nuclear warfare,” Hawk told The Inertia. “There are a lot of people out there who think they’re on the side of good when they do really terrible things.”
Hawk, who grew up surfing in San Diego, became the editor of SURFER in 1990. He relocated to the Bay Area in 2000, working as the editor of Sierra and later Stanford Business. But even after his years crafting editorial for surfing’s largest media publication of the era, he always stayed tied to his surfing roots. He’s a regular in the lineups around his home in Half Moon Bay and still writes columns for The Surfer’s Journal.
Even though the protagonist in his new book is a surfer, Hawk says he only has one scene that actually features wave riding. But surf culture and lingo are ingrained in the story. Hawk said he researched during ride-alongs with state lifeguards and, when he was stuck in the plot, he’d drive to the beach where the scene was taking place, putting himself in his characters’ headspace to find inspiration.
“When you write a travel story about surfing, often the least interesting part is the stuff that happens in the water,” Hawk said. “The real story is in the interaction between humans, between characters.”
That said, there is still plenty for the non-surfing audience to learn about the ocean from Nearshore. Hawk hopes that readers gain an understanding of the intimate ocean knowledge surfers acquire — how wave energy behaves when it reaches the shoreline.
“I’ve always felt that surfers don’t get acknowledged for how much they know,” Hawk said. “It’s a strange kind of intelligence, and because it’s a hard thing to put in words, I thought it would be fun to try to do that. So my protagonist talks about that a lot, but you don’t actually see him out there doing it.”
After a career of writing in the non-fiction realm, Hawk admits that it was an intimidating transition to the blank slate of a novel. Fear held him back, but he eventually learned that even the greatest writers often start penning a novel without knowing where the plot will go. It became “liberating” once he dove into the story and dealt with the plot hurdles as they arose.
Hawk doesn’t want to preach moral or life lessons in his novel. He simply wants to entertain. But he hopes readers, and surfers in particular, will connect to one of the book’s central themes: the duality between the analytical side of the brain when we clock into work, and the instinctive, animal side we tap into when we surf. For Hawk, surfers possess a perspective that can not be replicated anywhere else.
“Ocean waves are really unique in the human experience,” Hawk said, “because they’re the only waveform, of any sort, where you can actually ride an individual pulse of energy as it moves through the universe.”
Editor’s Note: You can also pre-order Nearshore through your local bookstore. Want an autographed copy? Order one through Ink Spell Books in Half Moon Bay.
