Hello, Dear Reader!
I'm Iaroslav Dombrovskyi, an author of the science fiction series “Sonya and Terah, Space Investigators,” and an athlete on the National Ukrainian Surfing Team (2021-current with 4 appearances in the World Surfing Championship).
Please, allow me to share a short retrospective of my path, how my vision was formed and a synopsis of “Space Investigators”:
I was born in Kyiv, Ukraine, the year of the Chernobyl explosion. My grandfather was a “trusted" Soviet scientist, one of the people who was familiar with the underbelly of the Chernobyl situation and moved the family to the suburbs, away from the potentially affected area, to stay there for most of the duration of the year for several years.
Radioactive dust settled, and the family was back to Kiev.
Dashing nineties childhood was “interesting”—playing with kids in burnt buildings, jumping on the pile of bricks from the roof of the garage for giggles, and sliding down the iced slopes on the flipped toilet seat cover.
Parents sent me to a couple schools. The first one was “questionable” because of the bullies, fights, drug scene, and vodka. The second, which they picked unintentionally, turned out to be an enlightenment—extensive English, mathematics, physics, sports…and vodka (not proud of it but 90s Ukrainian kids didn’t really know otherwise…).
Eventually I got into skateboarding and started playing in a music band. These two activities introduced me to the civilized world of the “Rotting West” (as the Soviet propaganda and my grandfather called it).
I finished school and entered the National Technical University of Ukraine “Kiev Polytechnic Institute” on the “budget” (passed exams for free tuition). I picked a highly unpopular one at that time, “Welding Technologies.” While in university, first with the help of my parents, later on my own, I supported my living by working several jobs (occasionally at the same time)—construction laborer, welder, foreman, commercial meat and fish preparation and delivery, waiter, and food stand manager.
Playing in the rock band consumed more money than it returned... but it got me involved with acting and modeling.
Around that time happened my first conscious trip abroad (Czech Republic and Poland), where I was blown away by the cleanliness of public spaces, smiling faces, and department stores with brands from the US magazines.
I finished university with a master’s degree in engineering but, to my family’s disappointment, had zero interest in a career in that field or military service. However, music and acting/modeling had very limited possibilities in Ukraine, and the “Sovok” (Soviet) mentality of the majority of people began to “choke” me beyond tolerable. Music band members didn’t share my “Go West” enthusiasm, so I packed my stuff and left (which wasn’t easy because getting out from the post-communism hemisphere wasn’t a “hustle-free” initiative; my EU student visa application was denied twice, causing further complications (different story)).
For the next 2 years I spent most of my time in Barcelona, working as a nightclub promoter and getting ready to naturalize in Spain. I had a lined-up job and an employer that agreed to be my visa sponsor… but I won the US Green Card Lottery and was on the plane to the USA before anyone had a chance to express their opinions.
I landed in San Diego; it was beautiful but boring. Relocated to Los Angeles a week later and rented a room from a 62-years-young bluesman, Eric Williams, who passed away in the summer of 2025 (rest in peace, dear friend).
I got the job in the department store, picked up surfing, found an agent, and started going to modeling/acting auditions and working as a background actor.
I became better at surfing, obtained the instructor and lifeguard certifications, started coaching surfing, got busier with auditions, background acting, and some real acting gigs, and left the department store job.
Came time for my citizenship test.
Success—I became a proud American!
During the next few years, I’ve learned that teaching surfing is not that fun when it becomes a work routine (too many people believe that watching “Point Break” (with Keanu Reeves) before a surf lesson makes them awesome surfers), “scored” an ear infection and had to trade the instructor job for taxi driving and furniture assembling because background acting didn’t make ends meet (I never stopped surfing myself though).
Soon enough (hundreds of auditions later) I got slightly busier with acting, had a few promising gigs, and worked on sets with multiple A-list stars (David Guetta, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, and more), which, for the most part, turned out to be quite a disappointing experience—I was flabbergasted not only by the harsh reality of the Hollywood production work process that has nothing to do with what you imagine it would be and the fakeness of too many people but also that I’ve learned about the dark side of the industry (luckily not on my skin)...and I’m actually a shitty actor too—I'm not good at pretending to be someone who I’m absolutely not.
While keeping up surfing during all that, through the local beach city church pastor (who was a surfer), I was introduced to a couple of fellows with whom we became good pals. It turned out that the “surfing bros” were DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) agents and real-life badasses (unlike fake Hollywood crybabies). By then, being tired of auditions, an unsuccessful acting career, fake people, and taxi driving (fun fact: in order to avoid conversations with passengers, I played audiobooks in a language they wouldn’t understand), I decided to get a job with federal law enforcement.
Customs and Border Protection was the first agency to respond to my application. I successfully passed tests, exams, and multiple interviews (they require a higher education from an accredited institution and were satisfied with a master's in engineering from NTUU “KPI”). Right before the final step of the hiring process, which is the polygraph, COVID happens.
I’ll be back to this point in just a moment, because there are a few important “before COVID” highlights that I need to add to the mix:
- A group of surfing enthusiasts from Odessa wanted to bring Ukraine onto the world stage so badly that they created a Ukrainian Olympic Surfing Federation, entered the International Surfing Association, and organized the first-ever National Ukrainian Championship in Odessa, where I traveled (from LA) to participate and gained a spot on the national team (Fun fact: The first Ukrainian surfing championship, with a dude from the USA competing in it, was on the national news).
- Surfing becomes an Olympic sport in 2020 but the first event is postponed until 2021.
- A marvelous Nayib Bukele becomes president of El Salvador and starts a massive anti-crime operation that eventually leads to the construction of CECOT (Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo), but what is most important in this case is that he sat down with the International Surfing Association (based in San Diego), promising to organize Olympic qualifications and that there would be no gang problem during the event (promise kept); he united two villages on the coast of El Salvador into a “Surf City” (current capital of the World Surfing Games) and held the first World Championship as a part of the Olympic qualification in 2021 while the rest of the world was still in lockdown.
- The Ukrainian Olympic Team application to participate in the Championship went through at the last possible second, making it the first time ever that Ukraine was represented on the world stage in surfing, participating every year since.
But back to Customs and Borders and
the COVID scene in LA:
My federal job offer is postponed, and LA County is in lockdown so strict that they arrest a paddleboarder on the water near Malibu Pier, bulldoze skateparks, and close beaches and OUTSIDE sports centers.
The Knowledge Square
at NTUU "KPI", Kyiv
That was the moment when my education kicked in and I was like, "That is simply not how it works on the particle scale. The whole 6-foot distancing and masking don't have any physical/chemical relevance to what they are used against, but speaking that part out loud turned out to be prohibited by "science" (Wait…WHAT?), while at the same time, neighboring Orange County didn’t really go on lockdown at all. Now you have Orange County, Florida, and the El Salvador coasts, where you can surf during COVID… and nobody gets sick (what a strange coincidence).
But other than surfing part of the day in Huntington Beach (Orange County), I was still living in locked-down Los Angeles. A bunch of free time provided me with an opportunity to dive into reading and listening to books, because after working in Hollywood, my interest in showbiz was completely deflated (also, never drinking whiskey & coke after lockdown ever again…). First it was light fantasy and easily digestible sci-fi; later, heavier/hard sci-fi and worldwide classics: Hemingway, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Bulgakov, Edgar Allan Poe, Solzhenitsyn, Hašek, Lem, Asimov, Herbert, Orwell, Bradbury, etc.
Then, a few thousand hours of books later, without ever being interested in any sort of political or social developments, I suddenly found myself being quite aware of what kind of public manipulation is going on and what tools are being used to rotate the gears of the anti-Western civilization apparatus (which at that time tripped over people that didn’t buy into media-propagated hysteria and weren’t afraid to stand their ground… and the American Constitution).
Sometimes during that period I also saw this sophisticated gentleman talking about “skateboarders’” mentality. Everything he outlined was unarguably correct, even though it was evident that the fellow never set his foot on the skateboard and I was like, “Let me check out his books!”
Yeah… that fellow was Jordan Peterson.
Lockdown is slowing down; I received a call from Customs and Border Protection, went for a polygraph test… and after SEVEN HOURS AND 45 MINUTES of lovely Q&A, I didn’t pass.
Answering your question: “No, I didn’t lie (also that is not how a polygraph works).” My guess (because they don’t give you feedback) is that after three hours dedicated to the “nightclub promoter in Barcelona” situation, the guy didn’t believe that I never sold/used drugs (can’t blame him for that because not getting involved with the drug scene with that type of job in that area is nearly impossible; nevertheless, it was my principle, so I never did… (I never even smoked marijuana in my life)) and twice denied EU visas didn’t help either.
Not getting a federal law enforcement job didn’t upset me much and I was back at a department store and picked up part time videoediting. My reads and interests widened; I got into subjects discussed by Jordan Peterson, Douglas Murray, Charlie Kirk, Mosab Hassan Yousef, and many more.
Not only did it help me realize how most of modern Hollywood and media are influencing (manipulating/brainwashing) their audience, but on top of that, it became quite upsetting to me that there have been absolutely no noteworthy new developments, characters, or major stories since Harry Potter; everything is prequel, sequel, reboot, restart, remake, extension, side character, “narrative” matching routine, race/gender swap, transgenderism, agendas, ideology, etc… but “somehow,” even if you are NOT bringing THAT up and just pointing out the fact that it is poorly written, terribly executed, green-screened, and horrifically CGIed pulp—it makes you a racist and homophobe (wait…WHAT?).
So when I “exhausted” the pool of sci-fi and classics within my field of interest (also, after writers like Asimov/Lem/Herbert/Dostoevsky/Tolstoy/Bulgacov/etc., the majority of other reads feel pretty “dry”), I was searching for what would be a “Lord of the Rings/War and Peace/1984, scientifically relevant space adventure”... well… I haven’t found one; however, I have accumulated a hefty amount of ideas about what it would be that I started writing down, assembling the concept on the rail of technological relevancy (my master’s degree in engineering came in handy) and building around the moral core of healthy modern western family values and priorities.
Therefore, after two years and hundreds of “crumpled” pages, I finally reached the point of being relatively satisfied with my storytelling skills (never stop working on improving them, though), moved to north Florida to surf in the warm water and published my first book. The rest is in progress…
So... here is the full synopsis:
"After introducing some key concepts and characters of Sonya and Terah’s world in the first book (Romeo and Jill), the “Space Investigators” series dives into the story of a young woman, Sonya, from the most influential family in the space industry. She survives the “accidental” explosion of the city on the moon, where she was helping to run the family business.
Waking up from a long coma, she discovers that life on Earth is changing for the worse in the name of “greater good,” her relatives are dead or missing, and there is no record of events that occurred on the moon.
Devastated and driven by pure instincts at first, she enters the secret “Space Investigators” program, which turns out to be the ultimate challenge because it deals with the darkest aspects and representatives of the human species as well as requiring her to be in reliable physical and mental shape.
The one positive change that occurred in the world is that dogs grew smarter and became not only most families' pet-members but also earned wider involvement with the workforce in every field—medical, education, law enforcement, entertainment, military, and, of course, cosmos.
Investigators with their dogs go through overwhelming training that is not only aimed to prepare them for the job but also to filter out individuals who don’t have the heart and morals for the duty (also, because I, as an author, am freaking “allergic” to the “Mary Sue” and “Girl Boss” type of character building, while OG Clarice, Ripley, and Sarah are my absolute favorites).
Sonya picks up a German Shepard pup, which she names Terah (wanderer), who does great in training until he starts to act differently. Confused at first, the girl eventually deduces that Terah, on top of the conventional for-the-trained-dog ability to identify and communicate hundreds of smells, mysteriously learned to “sniff out” people’s emotions and intentions. On one hand, it makes her an absurdly effective investigator and “undetectable” secret agent but on the other hand, the world around her begins to reshape quickly and Terah’s talent puts her in immense danger, as now she simply knows too much while she can’t “blow her cover.”
Not without help from reliable friends in the scientific and technological community, Sonya brings to light cases that become exponentially more complicated, up to the level of interplanetary conspiracies. During one of the investigations, the girl and the dog spontaneously pick up the trace of the lunar events that she survived. With Terah’s abilities, of evidently extraterrestrial nature, they’ll have to solve the puzzle on the scale of the human place in the universe. BUT, at the end of the day, it turns out to be not about the final standoff between the good and bad guys; instead, it's about the path of a person’s consciousness from a family cradle taken for granted to the state of mind that appreciates and protects it at all costs as a grail of mankind’s prosperity and preservation………………..AND the final standoff...because this isn’t some “soy” melodramatic utopia (you know exactly what I mean, considering how big platforms eventually ruin everything they touch).
FYI/Disclaimer: I know it might seem strange that the main character of the series (Sonya) only has a short appearance in the stories of the desperate pilot and the nurse on the moon in the first book but I made it this way to establish the concept of the alternative world of “investigators” and introduce some of the key figures in further developments: the mysterious engineer/space cowboy Wild Bill and the lady doctor, Three-Finger Jill, who disappeared after the events of the first book but remains a keeper of one of Sonya's biggest secrets in the future.
This doggo has nothing to do with anything at all... I took this picture at the department store because... you just look at that good boy...
The second book is in progress...