This book began with a fourteen-year-old boy reading about the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. That one fact, that a rock from space could end an entire world, lodged in me and wouldn’t leave. What if that power were wielded on purpose? What if someone could destroy not one world but whole star systems? I wrote a crude short story chasing the idea, one of my earliest attempts at fiction, and I’d planted the seed.
The second seed came soon after, when I read Robert Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. Heinlein showed me how my asteroid could become a weapon.
A sentient computer calculating trajectories to drop lunar rocks onto Earth. Simple mass and velocity, turned into planet-killing force by orbital mechanics alone. He’d weaponized my revelation and wrapped it in a colonial rebellion. A colony rising against the power that controlled it, and the brutal question of whether violent revolt against overwhelming force can ever be justified.
Natural disaster and engineered destruction, rocks from space and the politics of who controls them. Those two ideas became the foundation of everything that followed.
Why did Peacekeeper take decades to finish?
Because life kept interrupting it, and because the story kept growing past whatever I’d learned to do.
At the very start it was a single image: a ship accelerating to nearly the speed of light and striking a planet. That was an idea and nowhere near a book. So it evolved the way my longest projects always have, in pieces. I’d write a little and stop. Come back months or years later, write a little more, and stop again. There was a full-time career, and alongside it a family and all the responsibilities that come with one.
There simply wasn’t time to do more than return to it in stolen hours, so that’s what I did, for decades.
Jessica Lang arrived early, probably in the very first iteration of the writing.
But I was young, I’d never written a woman character before, and I didn’t know what I was doing yet. Learning to write her was part of the forty-five years. The book and my ability to tell it grew up alongside each other. When I finally reached the point where I decided to finish everything I’d left unfinished, this was the first book I reached for.
Even then it took almost a year. It’s a complex book carrying complex themes, and getting it right one last time was its own long job.
When I came back to finish it, I threw the old draft away and started over, because it was all the stupid writing I did back then. The kernel never changed. What happens when a spaceship of 250 million tons hits a planet at 99% of the speed of light? I calculated it online, and the answer was every star within a hundred light years going nova.
The book on this: Peacekeeper: To What End Peace is a space opera about an immortal admiral who enforces an empire’s peace, and the price that peace exacts.
Why is the AI character in Peacekeeper so hard to write?
She’s the hardest character I’ve ever written, because she’s human on the surface and something else entirely underneath.
She looks human. She talks like a human. She’s a human-like mind, and you could call her human without being wrong. But she’s a created being. Nanobots thread through her body, repairing it, keeping it healthy, holding off death. And every forty years she’s recreated, rebuilt at the molecular level. Imagine every molecule of your body being torn apart and put back together, on a schedule, forever.
That’s the quiet horror at the center of the book, worse than any weapon in it, and it’s done to her deliberately.
That part was hard to write. I liked her too much to enjoy doing it to her, and I refused to soften it, because softening it would have been a lie about what the empire is.
She isn’t superpowered. She’s a little stronger than most people, but it barely shows and hardly matters. What matters is that she’s two hundred thousand years old. She’s watched civilizations born and dead, and stopped counting the worlds she’s burned. And she isn’t alone in her own head.
Imagine every molecule of your body being torn apart and put back together, on a schedule, forever.
She’s fused, mind to mind, with the ship she commands and with an intelligence called Brain. The being sitting on the command throne is three consciousnesses sharing one interior. She’s a trinity, and that was deliberate. Every one of those things had to be true at once and still add up to someone a reader could follow into the dark. Human on the outside, created and ancient and multiple on the inside, and both real on the same page.
That’s why she took decades to learn to write.
How do you write an AI character that shares a human mind?
Brain is the most intimate version of something I keep returning to.
I’ve written artificial minds before. There are AI points of view in Shield of Ashes, and the whole of Collision with Andromeda reaches for a non-human consciousness. This one is the closest in. An intelligence that’s shared one mind with a woman for two hundred thousand years, whose presence is indistinguishable from her own thoughts until it chooses otherwise.
For most of the book, Brain is simply the constant of Jessica’s existence. It finishes her thoughts. It reads the room she can’t see. It watches the enemy’s face and tells her when the composure cracks. In a life measured in burned worlds and quiet afterward, it’s the one voice always there. I wanted the reader to feel that closeness and come to rely on Brain the way Jessica does. The relationship has to read as the deepest one she has.
Writing a mind that lives inside another mind, and making it feel like company instead of a gadget, is a different craft problem. Nothing about it works like a character who stands in a room. With no body, face or gesture to work with, everything rides on voice and thought, woven so tightly that the reader forgets where one ends and the other begins. Jessica forgot a long time ago.
Why is Peacekeeper such a dense science fiction novel?
Because I put more large ideas into this single story than into anything else I’ve made. Any one of them could have carried its own novel.
Immortal beings who have lived long enough to lose count of their own memories.
Interstellar travel that stays slower than light, with none of the usual hand-waving that lets a plot skip the hard parts. Space empires and the machinery of controlling twenty thousand colonies from one throne. Colonies in open revolt, and the moral mathematics of imperial response. A definite enemy. Artificial minds that speak to each other, and to their human, as though they were human too. And that’s only the start of the list. The book is concept stacked on concept.
My other big books grew by a method I think of as dropping inkblots and letting them spread into each other.
This one was a harder problem than that. It was a matter of welding a large number of already-big ideas into one coherent story that holds together without the seams showing. Any of these concepts pulling too hard in its own direction would have torn the book apart.
Making all of them serve a single immortal woman’s story, at once, took draft after draft. The fusing of those ideas, far more than the having of them, is the reason the book was so hard to finish, and the reason I’m proudest of it holding together at all.
What does immortality do to a commander’s judgment?
The title carries the question. To What End Peace. Jessica is a Peacekeeper, and the empire she serves does keep the peace across twenty thousand worlds. But it keeps that peace the way the book’s opening shows it kept, with a fleet that can sterilize a planet in a matter of hours and a doctrine that answers defiance with annihilation. The order is real. The peace is real. And the cost of it is a level of violence that makes you ask what the word peace is even worth when this is what maintains it.
That’s the meditation I built the whole book around, the thing the forty-five years were reaching for: power, freedom, and the price of both.
What does it cost to hold a galaxy in order? What’s done to the people, and the beings, who are made into the instruments of that order? The book doesn’t hand you an answer.
It puts you on the command throne beside a woman who’s very, very good at her terrible job, and lets you feel the weight of what keeping the peace requires. And near its end it turns, and the turn reframes everything that came before it, and sets the course for everything still to come. The villain is hidden the whole way, standing right next to the hero until the end, and the hero doesn’t know it.
I’d have hated writing a book that answered the question in its own title. A story that settles something this big in its final chapter is cheating, and I wanted the weight Jessica carries to stay with the reader after the last page.
My take
A book that answers its own title is cheating, so this one doesn’t. I started it at fourteen and finished it forty-five years later, and the question never got easier. What is peace worth when a fleet that can sterilize a planet is what keeps it? Sit on the command throne beside Jessica and feel that weight. Don’t expect the book to settle it for you. I wanted you carrying it after the last page.
Where does To What End Peace sit in the Peacekeeper series?
It’s a pivot point in a longer story. There are three prequels that come before it, in order, telling the genesis of this universe, and there are more books planned to follow than I can list here. Peacekeeper: To What End Peace sits in the middle of that sequence, and the revelation it arrives at is the hinge the rest of the story turns on.
That’s part of why it mattered so much to get it right, and part of why it took a year even after forty-five.
It’s more than the book I’ve been trying to write for two-thirds of my life. It’s the keystone of the largest thing I’ve ever built. It began with a boy wondering about falling rocks, and it became a man understanding that the greatest destructions are often the most personal ones.
