Behind the Book: Sins of the Internet
It began around 2000 as a couple dozen HTML pages and grew across 25 years into a book. Here is the story behind my moral critique of the digital age.
Category: Behind the Book
Every book started somewhere specific: a phone call at the wrong hour, a job lost for the wrong reason, a canyon in 1986. These essays are those stories and the arguments that came out of them. Each one stands on its own and points at the book it produced.
Behind the BookBehind the Book: A Treachery of Legions
The general who won 69 AD for Vespasian and then disappeared from history. Here is the story behind my Roman novel about Marcus Antonius Primus.
Behind the BookBehind the Book: Ridiculous Things People Actually Believe
An episode of Ancient Aliens started it. Here is the story behind my unsparing field guide to conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and the machinery that sells them.
Behind the BookBehind the Book: Grim
Grim began with one scene at the crucifixion and grew into a novel about a reaper who attends death across all of history. Here is the story behind it.
Behind the BookBehind the Book: The Woman Who Walked Through Walls
I started at the execution scene and wrote backward. Here is the story behind three women, a device that removes consequences, and what people do when they cannot be caught.
Behind the BookBehind the Book: Family on Ice
I wanted to write prehistoric people as they were, not as primitives. Here is how the real Toba supervolcano and a single family became Family on Ice.
Behind the BookBehind the Book: Complications
Complications was a deliberate turn away from my usual military and science fiction. Here is why I set out to write a book women would enjoy, and what it taught me.
Behind the BookBehind the Book: Peacekeeper: To What End Peace
I started Peacekeeper when I was fourteen and finished it forty-five years later. Here is the story behind an immortal admiral, an empire's peace, and the price of both.
Behind the BookBehind the Book: Shield of Ashes
Shield of Ashes asks what a real nuclear war would look like in a multipolar world. Here is how a short story about one launch became the biggest book I have written.
Behind the BookBehind the Book: Unlikely Hero
Unlikely Hero started with a single image, a nuclear bomb near Los Angeles, and became a two-character story about a criminal, a cop, and one impossible choice. Here is how it was built.
Behind the BookBehind the Book: Collision with Andromeda
Collision with Andromeda sat unfinished for eight years. Here is the story behind a novel told partly from the point of view of a galaxy, and the lonely mind at its heart.
Behind the BookBehind the Book: Buttercup
I spent almost twenty years unable to write about my marriage to Claudia. The book only worked once I stopped telling it and let Buttercup, our cat, tell it instead.