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‘Nearshore’ blends surfing and nuclear warfare in Steve Hawk’s debut novel

August 22, 2026

Steve Hawk has had a lifelong love for the ocean, back when his parents operated a hot dog stand at Ocean Beach in San Diego, where he would spend long days in the sand and surf.

“My mom would say the lifeguards were my babysitters,” the long-time writer joked from his home in Half Moon Bay, where his views of the ocean gave him the perfect inspiration as he wrote his first novel, “Nearshore.”

Hawk has long weaved the waves and coastal seascape into his writing, a former journalist who worked for newspapers early in his career in San Diego, as well as several years at the Orange County Register in the ’80s, taking any chance he could to write about his passion for surfing.

He would write so many surfing stories, the editors at “Surfer” Magazine – often called the ‘bible of surfing’– hired him as a freelancer, then in 1990 brought him on as staff editor.

Nearshore is a novel by former journalist Steve Hawk, a thriller with a surfer's twist. (Book cover image courtesy of Viking Books) — Nearshore is a novel by former journalist Steve Hawk, a thriller with a surfer’s twist. (Book cover image courtesy of Viking Books)

“As a person who grew up wanting to be a surfer and a writer, it was absolutely a dream job,” he said, talking on his 71st birthday on Aug. 14.

He got to cover Kelly Slater’s first world championship (the Florida surfer now holds 11 world titles), the start of tow surfing, and the birth of big-wave surfing in California, at the helm of the magazine when they published the first story of Mavericks, a monster of a wave that sits just a stone’s throw from his home.

After landing a job in 1990 as editorial director at Surfline.com, a surf forecasting company that had relocated its headquarters to San Francisco during the dot-com era, he migrated to Northern California and found a passion and love for the rustic, remote coastline and cold-water surfing.

“I fell in love with this area,” he said. “There is a lot of surf around here. In fact, there are many days you wish there was less surf.”

The wave-riding lure could be why the book took him five years to complete, he joked.

“If the waves were good, I surfed,” he said. “I never had a deadline.”

The idea for “Nearshore” dates back to surf sessions in 2019 while working as an editor and writer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. His main task was to help the college’s professors translate dense scholastic research into understandable papers that business execs could utilize.

“Nearshore” isn’t the average surfer book, but it’s rooted in his own family’s history when his father, a young man at the time, flew torpedo bombers off of aircraft carriers in WWII.

Not knowing if he would be sent overseas and killed, he proposed to Hawk’s mom that June, and their wedding was scheduled for Aug. 17, 1945. After the United States dropped atomic bombs in Japan in early August, the Japanese forces surrendered on Aug. 14, and the wedding went on as planned.

The couple later had their children, Steve and Tony (yes, that Tony Hawk, the skateboarding legend).

“I had very mixed feelings about the atom bomb my whole life. There’s a good chance my dad would have been killed, none of us would have been born, if not for the bomb,” he said. “At least that was the story we were told our whole life.”

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One of the first non-fiction novels he ever read was “Hiroshima” by John Hersey, further fueling his fascination with nuclear weapons.

“I’ve just had a lifelong interest,” he said. “I did a whole lot of research on how a terrorist would build one, with help from a lot of experts.”

Because of his time at Stanford, he was interested in exploring the “dark side of Silicon Valley and its cadre of reckless billionaires who are increasingly encroaching on the beaches I love.”

So he asked himself: What would be the most reckless thing one of those narcissistic geniuses could do?

The answer seemed obvious. They’d build nukes.

Each chapter throughout the book is captured through a different point of view, he said. The seaside setting throughout the book and the surf lifestyle is written by someone with six decades of experience in that world – a unique tone that “tourists” to the surf world can try too hard, and usually fail, to emulate.

Author Steve Hawk, seen here next to a glacier in Antartica, has a passion for cold-water surfing. (Photo courtesy of Art Brewer/Hawk)

“They all have some moment where the person talks about the mystical transcendence aspect of riding a wave. I tried really hard to avoid that, at least the clichéd version of that,” he said.

His goal is for readers to be entertained.

“It’s a thriller, it’s formulaic,” he said. “It opens with something I hope will grip people’s interest.”

Hawk will have a book release event at the Rivian Theater in Laguna Beach on Aug. 27.

‘Nearshore’ blends surfing and nuclear warfare in Steve Hawk’s debut novel Orange County Register

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‘Nearshore’ blends surfing and nuclear warfare in Steve Hawk’s debut novel

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