Michael
Johnson
Michael Johnson writes satirical, unsentimental novels about education, sex, power, and cultural collapse, drawn from lived experience, academic failure, and American life, with humor, anger, and a refusal to soften what matters today.
Cactus Time
A Post Cultural Odyssey
Cactus Time is a satirical dystopian novel set in a desert university town where culture has been replaced by jargon, screens, and ritualized ignorance. Professor Merridith Winters, an obsolete intellectual, drags his semi-literate companion Travis through libraries, malls, classrooms, and bureaucratic wastelands, documenting the wreckage. Education reforms, sexual liberation, and compassion programs curdle into control systems. The book mixes farce, obscenity, and argument, asking what survives when history, language, and thought are treated as disposable, and whether resistance is still possible in a blistering unforgiving American landscape.
About The Author
MIchael
Johnson
Michael Johnson is an American novelist whose work focuses on education, power, sex, and the slow collapse of intellectual life. A graduate of UC Berkeley, he spent years working outside literary circles, writing steadily while supporting himself as a delivery driver. He began writing fiction in 1980, influenced early by Charles Bukowski but shaped more decisively by lived experience and institutional failure. His debut novel, Buz and Stif Go to College, set the tone for a body of work that favors satire over sentiment and observation over theory.
Johnson writes without rigid routines, preferring instinct, persistence, and revision. His novels avoid polite conclusions and stock characters, aiming instead to document how people think, speak, and survive inside damaged systems. He lives quietly, reads widely, and continues to write with skepticism, humor, and stubborn independence. His fiction resists comfort, marketing language, and the demand to reassure readers at all times.
