Derek Cressman is an award-winning author of fiction and non-fiction based in Sacramento, California. His most recent novel is Virtuality, released in November 2025.
Cressman wrote countless white papers, op-ed columns, fact sheets and reports as well as two books as part of a thirty-year career in public policy advocating for democracy issues such as campaign finance reform and voting rights. In 2019, he published his first novel, Reality™ 2048, which was a finalist in the Foreword INDIES Book of the year and First Horizon American Fiction Book awards. Cressman is a graduate of Williams College, holds a Standford Novel Writing certificate, and has served as a teaching assistance at The Writers Hotel Mini MFA conference.
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Reality(TM) 2048–Watching Big Mother
An inquisitive woman who goes through the dreary motions of life in a not too distant Los Angeles that has lost its vivacity. Vera escapes her hollow world through a deep search within herself to avoid a deluge of commercial information. She gradually develops the capacity for independent thought, falls in love, and must then avoid a seductive technology that could render her catatonic.
More than pure science fiction, Reality™ 2048 is among today’s foremost political books that challenge the tenants of Ayn Rand, globalism, and judicial activism with characters who confront the murky boundaries between rationality and emotion, objective truth and lived experience. Vera’s journey explores how socially manufactured identity blocks what each of us can comprehend and asks whether democratic society can exist when we no longer believe that anything is true. It’s where reality TV and mindless pursuit of technology could take us if we cannot find ways to reconnect with the real world and with one another.
Virtuality
It’s 2065 in Southern California. Virtuality’s post-Orwellian, pre-Matrix satire is a near-future dystopia on the verge of collapse. When a mysterious hacker disrupts transmissions, four quirky misfits find out that the streaming infotainments of their customized MyndScreen™ brain implants have noxious side effects—not to mention the addictive free extruded soyalgent food that everyone’s eating. Who will succumb to corporate commercialism on steroids? Who will survive the apocalypse?
When Money Talks—An Instruction Manual to Overturn Citizens United
Americans know that the corrupting influence of special interest money is destroying our democratic process. And now that the Citizens United decision has thrown out campaign spending limits as abridgments of free speech, they want to know what they can do about it. When Money Talks is a citizen instructions manual that gives us the tools, both intellectual and tactical, to fight back.