Doctor Id was published in 1998 by Random House. It won a Children’s Book Council of Australia Notable Book of the Year Award, was published in Italian alongside novelizations of Alfred Hitchcock films, and was even serialised in Japan with dramatic manga artwork.
From there on, Simon recalls, 'The flood gates were open'. Two crime fiction sequels to Doctor Id followed, the siege drama Cybercage and the psychological thriller The Stalking Zone. Simon also penned the sea adventure Thunderfish, the strikingly unique tale of an orphaned billionaire reinventing herself as the 21st century’s Captain Nemo. The novel became an Australian bestseller, earned Simon another Notable Book Award, and even attracted the interest of 2 Hollywood film studios, though ultimately, no movie was made.
Thunderfish spawned two sequels of its own. Under No Flag tackled marine-based environmental terrorism and was shortlisted for a Ned Kelly Crime Fiction Award. To prepare for writing the finale of the trilogy, In the Jaws of the Sea, Simon studied submarine survival technology with help from friends in the Royal Australian Navy, and undertook several advanced SCUBA courses, obtaining Shipwreck Diving and Deep Diving licenses.
After moving from Adelaide to northern New South Wales, Simon imagined a post-disaster Australia, plunged back into medievalism by a global climate apocalypse with catastrophic flooding. So was born his year 2000 novel Beyond the Shaking Time. Ironically, the book's radical climate-change dystopian context was seen at the time as 'a science fiction trope'.
Ultimately returning to his childhood inclination to write historical adventures, Simon 'tested the water’ by penning an epic set in historical Asia. In 2007 it won the Fellowship of Australian Writers Literary Award for Unpublished Manuscript. That emboldened Simon to write the young adult novel: Tomodachi: The Edge of the World, about the son of an English lord shipwrecked in Shogun-era Japan and befriended by displaced samurai youngsters.