Michael Hartnett, an English teacher at Jericho High School, has published his first novel, Universal Remote, which hit book stores early this year. "This novel is a strange journey through our Turn-of-the-Millennium World," said Hartnett during an interview with the Syosset-Jericho Tribune.

In Universal Remote, newspaper columnist Russell Pines decides to spend a year completely immersed in technology. Pines, as "Technoman" must eat only unnatural foods, interact only through machines, sleep with women who have had plastic surgery and walk around with a hard-drive strapped to his back and a monitor planted in front of his face.

"One day I was thinking about people who had spent a year or two completely immersed in nature," said Hartnett, "and I wondered what someone's life would be like completely immersed in technology." Russell Pines acts out this fantasy in the novel.

Another character in the novel, Paddy Dangus, causes all types of problems in suburbia. He is known as a "technoterrorist" as he attempts to knock-out technology. During the Super Bowl, Dangus cut the cable wires; During Christmas time, he knocked-out the electricity at the Roosevelt Field Mall and also wiped out the web and cut out cell phone transmitters. There are many other intense, technology-driven characters introduced throughout the novel.

Universal Remote "embraces technology even though technology is so vulnerable," explained Hartnett. "Things can go haywire so quickly." Hartnett compared Paddy Dangus to the hackers who jammed many web pages last week.

The novel contains five interrelated story lines which are broken down into channels rather than chapters. The 103 channels throughout the novel average about three pages in length. "Our attention span is such that we move from one thing to the next with hardly any time in-between," said Hartnett. "I was trying very hard to capture the rhythms of our lives and that is why there are short channels instead of chapters."

According to a book review by Ken Darr on amazon.com, Universal Remote is a postmodern journey through suburbia arresting the reader with its visions of misunderstood, misapplied and misinterpreted technology. It is all at once a mystery, comedy, satire and personal manifesto in which the author deftly intertwines the elements of a technologically starved society which knows not what it craves for."

According to Hartnett, so many aspects of our lives focus on technology. "The book is entitled Universal Remote as the remote is a very powerful instrument," he noted. "People spend so much time with it. They can sit in front of a television for three hours switching around the channels because they have the remote in their hand."

Hartnett's inspiration for writing this book was seeing the dependence that society has on today's technology. Most of his inspiration comes from the world around him. According to Hartnett, so many aspects of our lives have changed because of the technology that we have in our lives today.

Writing a novel is very time consuming and Hartnett has the difficult task of enriching the lives of young students on top of that. Hartnett has been teaching 11th and 12th grade English in the Jericho School District since 1993. "It took me one furious year to write this novel. It was a very intense, but good year," said Hartnett. "The hardest part was finding the time, but I usually teach during the day and write during the night." Hartnett uses his summer vacations to edit and polish his novels.

The advice that Hartnett gives to his students, and also to other aspiring writers, is to love what they do. "I usually tell people to write about what they love," he said. "Look to the type of writing that you like most and follow it. It is not usually a nine-to-five job, so you have to really enjoy what you do."

Although Hartnett has had other works published, this is his first novel. "I have been thinking and writing about technology for years. Before I got my Ph.D. in 1997 I was writing a lot of scholarly material which I had published," he said. "After I received my Ph.D., I was finally free to write about what I wanted - fiction."

Hartnett is currently working on another novel and plans to continue writing technology-inspired books. Universal Remote is now available in bookstores.