A disgraced special operations officer turned reluctant colonial leader.
✯
An injured military veteran forced to defend against British invaders.
✯
And a rookie journalist putting his life on the line to uncover the truth.
✯
These are the main characters you will soon meet in the sweeping saga of the Atlas Nations series, starting with the soon-to-be-released first book: WRITING IN THE SAND.
This project has been in the pipeline for nearly four years and now that it’s finally out in the open, I wanted to share my inspiration for the novel. There will be articles in the coming days about the ensemble cast of characters on display in WRITING IN THE SAND, so I am starting with what helped me create the universe in which they live.
Ideas for the Atlas Nations project first appeared in my mind around 2016. Some of you may remember a few seismic events that year (which I won’t bang on about) but seeing the friction between nations of the world increase, it got me thinking about the future. With the unity of this entire planet appearing a long way off, what would it look like if Earth’s factions carried their disputes to the stars?
If new habitable worlds were discovered in a political climate similar to today’s, interplanetary colonisation could only be chaotic… and potentially violent. That’s because humans have previous for this sort of thing and, let’s not forget, ours is a species that never learns.
The last time an attractive array of new territory was presented to the civilised world, their existing conflicts were projected onto a new theatre of war. I refer, of course, to the seventeenth-century colonisation of America, which saw the British, Dutch, French and Spanish fight to establish their presence on a new continent. Famously, the city of New York was once called New Amsterdam before the Dutch were forced to surrender it to the British in 1664 as part of an ongoing clash between the two nations.
So, when I read a copy of Winston Churchill’s The Great Republic: A History of America at the same time as my own world was becoming more fractured, the combination of the past and the present fuelled my view of the future.
Science fiction was done a huge service by the original series of Star Trek in the 1960s. This was, in part, because of the visionary thinking of Gene Roddenberry, who predicted a world where the factions of Earth had put aside their differences to become a founding member of the United Federation of Planets. Controversially for the time, this included showing the American population a world in which their compatriots were equals among a crew of Asians, Russians and aliens from other planets.
I love Star Trek as much as the next science fiction enthusiast, but for me, the biggest leap, if we can call it that, is not the aliens, spaceships or strange outer-space phenomenon, but the politics of planet Earth! Take a look at the world today and tell me whether or not you think we would ever kick it all in to become one political body!
So that brings me to the premise of WRITING IN THE SAND. As someone living in the United Kingdom, I considered this future scenario through the prism of my own country. The idea of Britain vs the world, or indeed Europe, has been a much-discussed one in recent years, so I wondered what that might look like on an interstellar and colonial level.
What I settled on was a universe in which the other nations of Earth have made a head start on the new territory (the Proxima Centauri system in this case) while the British are prepared to break the rules a little bit to get their fair share.
Part of me enjoyed the notion that my country of origin would be, in some part, “the baddies”. Keen fans of That Mitchell and Webb Look will know exactly what I’m talking about here but, don’t worry, nobody’s helmets have skulls on in this story!
But just as we see from the current affairs of the world today, not everything is as black and white as ‘goodies vs baddies’. The best stories present characters on both sides of a divide, highlighting that good and evil exist in equal measure either side of that line. That’s what I’ve tried to achieve in the Atlas Nations series and I am looking forward to telling you more about my main characters in the coming days.
WRITING IN THE SAND comes out on Tuesday, April 21, 2020. It is available to order from the Kindle Store now.
