Bruce McCandless III is the author of the biography Wonders All Around: The Incredible True Story of Astronaut Bruce McCandless II and the First Free Flight in Space, an Amazon bestseller that was named a Best Book of 2021 by both Men's Journal and Kirkus Reviews. Wonders All Around is first and foremost a relationship story about a family caught up in a father's ambitions, disappointments, and struggle for professional redemption, all as played out against the real-life drama of America's manned space program in the Apollo, Skylab, and early Shuttle years.

A lifelong Texan, Bruce is also the author of the interlinked historical horror novels In the Land of Dead Horses, Sour Lake, and The Black Book of Cyrenaica, as well as a modern fairy tale for pre-teens called Beatrice and the Basilisk. Named Austin's Poet Laureate by the Austin American-Statesman in 2000, he has published poems, stories, and essays in The Seattle Review, The Asian Wall Street Journal, Pleiades, Bayou, and other journals.

With his daughter Carson, Bruce wrote Carson Clare's Trail Guide to Avoiding Death (And Other Unpleasant Consequences), a book of poems for middle-schoolers that Indie Reader gave a perfect 5.0 score and that Kirkus Reviews calls an "amusing and friendly handbook" with "delightful verse and surprisingly useful tips." Bruce and Carson also teamed up to write Beatrice at Bay (2020), a Beatrice sequel that Kirkus touts as "an often thrilling and nuanced fantasy novella."