Behind the Book: Peacekeeper: To What End Peace
August 19, 2026
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.
Series: Behind the Book (Page 3)
Behind the BookBehind the Book: Shield of Ashes
August 18, 2026
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
August 17, 2026
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
August 14, 2026
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
August 13, 2026
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.
Behind the BookBehind the Book: Eurydice
September 1, 2026
Jules Verne gave Tom Ayrton about thirty pages and never went inside him. Twelve years alone on Tabor Island, marooned as punishment, rescued and reformed and killed off as machinery for somebody else’s adventure. This is his account.
Behind the BookBehind the Book: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
September 1, 2026
Verne wrote political manifestos with a plot wrapped around them. The situation is strong and there is nobody inside it, so this version hands the narration to the harpooner who wants off the ship.
Behind the BookBehind the Book: The Mysterious Island, Neb’s Side
September 15, 2026
Verne gave Neb one job and no interior life. He is on almost every page of the original and never once in a sentence that matters. This version is the correspondent’s private record, and it exists to correct that.
Behind the BookBehind the Book: The Time Machine
September 1, 2026
Wells wrote a class allegory dressed in science fiction and sent his Time Traveller forward alone, which makes the middle of the book pure narration. This version puts somebody in the seat beside him.
Behind the BookBehind the Book: Altverse
September 1, 2026
Piers Anthony built several universes that each made sense on their own terms, and they were the first alternate universe books I read. Altverse is what happened when I tried it: forty-three symbols on a ring, and a man who…
Behind the BookBehind the Book: Behind the Wire
September 1, 2026
My grandfather survived the camps and wrote it down after the war. I was seventeen, hiding from the family, when he asked whether I wanted to know about it. The book then waited decades.
Behind the BookBehind the Book: The Birth of the Augmented Human
September 1, 2026
The Death of Thinking is the diagnosis and this is the answer, following the same twelve people down the path they did not take. The practices are small, they compound, and they are what I do.