Stacey Cochran's sci-fi collection The Kiribati Test was published in September 2004; a literary novel The Band was published in May. In 1998, Cochran was a finalist for the Isaac Asimov Award. In 2001, at the age of twenty-seven, he finished graduate school, then packed everything he owned into a pickup truck and a U-Haul trailer and drove 2,370 miles across the country to Oracle, Arizona. In 2004, he was twice cited as a quarterfinalist for the Writers of the Future Contest, and in October, his novel Culpepper: The Father, the Son, and the Holy Shotgun was nominated as a finalist for the St. Martin's Press/PWA Best First Private Eye Novel Contest.