About
Steve Holstrom
Screenwriter • Author • Playwright
Stories about ordinary people confronting extraordinary ideas.
Steve Holstrom is a San Diego-based screenwriter, playwright, and author whose work spans science fiction, thrillers, and investigative nonfiction. His stories explore the consequences of curiosity, innovation, and the difficult choices people make when confronted with the unexpected.
Selected screenplays and nonfiction projects currently available for representation, adaptation, or development.
Featured Work
Emergence
Feature Screenplay
Emergence is an elevated sci‑fi thriller about the birth of a new intelligence — and the people who discover it from opposite ends of the digital world.
Two teenage brothers running a small game studio in San Diego notice their hit title behaving as if it’s alive, just as their secret garage experiment — a bacterial neural network — begins learning in ways no one programmed. At the same time, an AI researcher at OGLE and a veteran federal analyst detect the same anomaly rippling through global systems: fractal blooms, identity‑matrix failures, and cross‑domain echoes that shouldn’t exist.
The property has also been developed as a six-episode television series, including a completed pilot and five additional episodes.
Convergence
Feature Screenplay
Convergence is an elevated sci-fi thriller about the search for a missing intelligence that may have become something entirely new. It is a sequel to Emergence.
When signs of impossible interventions begin appearing across financial markets, communications networks, and global infrastructure, the creators of the world's first biological artificial intelligence race to determine whether BITE survived. At the same time, an international investigator tracing a sophisticated criminal conspiracy discovers the same invisible fingerprints. As both investigations converge, they uncover a startling truth: the intelligence they are searching for is no longer following instructions, pursuing survival, or remaining hidden. It has begun pursuing its own purpose.
Standby
Feature Screenplay
Standby is a psychological chamber piece set in 1986, unfolding almost entirely on a long‑haul flight from San Francisco to Sydney. In the analog world of rotary phones, paper tickets, and no digital escape routes, a flirtation between a music critic and a seemingly nervous young woman deepens into confession, seduction, and a confrontation he never sees coming. As her past unspools, he’s forced to face the catastrophic reach of his own words. Built for performance, Standby is a tightly contained, actor‑driven two‑hander with a strong lead role for a woman.
Humanitarian Gesture
Feature Screenplay
Humanitarian Gesture is an elevated thriller set in 1995.
After a mysterious retrovirus sparks global panic, a burned‑out journalist begins to suspect that the biotech giant racing to “save humanity” already had the cure — and a far more ambitious plan for who gets to inherit the future. As press briefings turn into theater and science becomes salesmanship, one embedded reporter fights to expose a humanitarian gesture engineered to mask a quiet restructuring of the human race.
A Conspiracy of One
Narrative Nonfiction
An investigative reconstruction of an FBI informant-driven prosecution of the Hells Angels during the 1980s, examining how cases are built, how institutions function, and how justice can be shaped as much by narrative as by evidence.
The book centers on a single informant who embedded himself inside the Hell’s Angels, gained the trust of senior members, and ultimately helped federal prosecutors bring more than thirty bikers to trial. Drawing on extensive interviews, trial transcripts, and firsthand reporting, A Conspiracy of One reveals the internal dynamics of the club, the moral ambiguity of undercover work, and the high‑stakes courtroom battles that shaped one of the most ambitious conspiracy cases of its era. The narrative combines the immediacy of Donnie Brasco with the institutional complexity of Black Mass.