Richard Harland is an Australian fantasy and science fiction writer, academic, and performance artist, living in New South Wales, Australia.

After he earned his Bachelor's degree, he planned an ambitious doctoral thesis that would focus on a global theory of poetry language, and approached numerous universities around the globe seeking funding for his research.

He returned to academic life in the 1980s through a tutoring position at the University of New South Wales and continued work on his doctoral thesis, which was published by Methuen (UK) as Superstructuralism: The Philosophy of Structuralism and Post-Structuralism in 1987.

He also wrote and distributed stories while at school, exchanging ongoing installments for sweets and other tokens, when other pupils were reluctant to part with legal tender.

He had been eager to write full length tales from late childhood but suffered from writer's block, which prevented him making significant headway with novel projects (and also many short stories) for much of the next 25 years.

However, with his publisher Pan Macmillan Australia's commission of a sequel to The Dark Edge for the next year, he could not meet the demands of full-time academic life while writing fiction.

Despite an uncertain future in a small Australian publication market—where books with relatively low volume sales were considered best-sellers and there were few full-time writers—he resigned from his academic role in 1997 to concentrate on his fiction.

[2] From the 1999 release of Hidden from View, the final volume to his Eddon and Vail series, every novel has been written either for young adults or children, with the exception of The Black Crusade (2004).

When Karl Evans Publishing started distributing the book, he approached individual booksellers in Brisbane, Canberra, Melbourne and Sydney to promote it.

It describes the journey of the hapless Basil Smorta, a multi lingual bank clerk, who is forced into the company of a group of "fundamental Darwinists" because they've imprisoned the object of his undying love, an Australian singer Volusia, in a mobile iron box.

The Black Crusade plays with the notion of the tale's reliability as a factual narrative, including fictional footnotes apparently inserted by the book's publishers, who deplore Basil's actions and despise his unheroic qualities.

Inspector Eddon Brac, a male detective with traditional sleuth leanings, is partnered with assistant Vail ev Vessintor, a goth woman aristocrat with expertise in the psychic sciences.

The series is set against the background of the planet Terra's colonial hegemony: its influence has spread across the cosmos, but is increasingly threatened by the Anti-Human, an unknown menace.

In preparation for writing the trilogy, Harland extensively researched angels and cosmology, including both the mainstream and unorthodox sources of Christian, Islamic and Judaic lore on the subjects.

[9] A race of talking, bipedal wolves have overrun and enslaved humankind, leaving only a determined resistance, known as the "Free Folk", who shelter in a subterranean refuge and plot to liberate themselves from their overlords.

The revelation unfolded over the larger story arc turns upon the mystery of how these creatures have risen from their former animal state, to become oppressive rulers of humankind.

The books focus on two children, a brother and sister, whose parents are taken by the wolves, and who subsequently join the "Free Folk" and become key to the success of the rebellion.

Laura Peterson has shown attention to detail in all the artwork pertaining to the wolves and helps to support the atmosphere of peril that Richard Harland has created.

Harland's series of YA steampunk novels commenced with Worldshaker, partly inspired by the works of Mervyn Peake and Charles Dickens.

For his third steampunk novel, Harland shifted the setting to an earlier period in the same world, later than the Napoleonic invasion of England (by a tunnel which was planned, but never built, in real history), but before the launching of the great city-ships or juggernauts.

There she falls in with a gang and discovers a talent as a drummer playing a new kind of rhythmical music—which is essentially rock 'n roll—only a century before Elvis and Bill Haley.

Feeling pity for his tribe’s supposed enemy, he feeds her mortal food and thereby "corrupts" her spiritual purity, even as he enables her to live in the terrestrial atmosphere.