The Questions That Wouldn’t Let Go

I didn’t set out to write three books in three different genres. I set out to write the stories that kept me awake at night, and it turns out those stories don’t respect genre boundaries.

Every book I’ve written started the same way, with a question that burrowed into my brain and refused to leave until I followed it somewhere.

Station 13 began with security cameras. I was thinking about how much we trust technology to show us the truth. We mount cameras in our homes, our businesses, our streets, and we treat what they capture like objective reality. But what if the camera was wrong? What if what you saw on the screen and what was actually happening diverged, and you had to choose which reality to trust?

The first version was smaller, domestic, claustrophobic, a woman alone in her home, watching feeds that didn’t match what she heard through the walls. But the question kept growing. I moved it into space, onto a remote station, and gave it to Commander Anna Dimitrovic. I surrounded her with a crew she loved like family. Then I made her choose between what she saw and what she believed, knowing the wrong choice would cost lives.

Writing Anna broke something open in me. I had to live inside a mind that was either seeing clearly while everyone else was blind, or shattering while believing itself whole. I wrote the ending and I still don’t know which one she was. That uncertainty stayed with me.

The Shepherd Descends came from ’Oumuamua. When that object passed through our solar system in 2017, one of the theories that surfaced was the uncomfortable one: what if it wasn’t natural? Most people brushed it aside. I couldn’t stop turning it over in my head.

Not the science of it. The humanity of it. How we would react. Would we reach for cooperation or competition? Would our factions and nations find common ground, or would first contact become another arena for the same territorial games we’ve always played?

I wrote The Shepherd Descends as an observer, watching us the way a scientist watches an experiment: clinical, patient, evaluating whether we could be trusted with neighbors. Seeing her catalog our fear responses and cooperation percentages forced me to look at our species from the outside. The view wasn’t always flattering. But there was hope in it too, in the scientists sharing data despite restrictions, in the kids drawing pictures while governments postured. We’re capable of being better than our worst impulses. Whether we choose to be is the question the book asks.

The Veiled Core Chronicles is different. The others gestated for months. This one has been living in my head for twenty years.

It started with a single image: pieces on a game board, except the pieces were alive. They could think. They could feel. They could suffer and love and die. And the players moving them didn’t care, because to them, losing a piece was just a setback in a larger game. That haunted me, the indifference of the hand that moves you while your entire world burns.

For two decades, I kept building. The game became The Board. The players became the Archons. The pieces became soldiers fighting wars they didn’t understand for reasons they’d never be told. And at the center of it all was a single scene: a woman in white armor crashing through a church wall to save nine soldiers who were about to die. She didn’t know she’d just been summoned into existence. She didn’t know her memories were fabrications. She didn’t know she was a piece, placed on the board by a player who saw her as a raised stake in an ongoing wager.

Writing that scene, finally, after twenty years of carrying it, felt like exhaling a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding.

I understand now that all three books ask the same question from different angles: what if the thing we assume is true isn’t? What if reality isn’t what we perceive? What if we aren’t alone? What if our existence itself was manufactured for someone else’s purpose?

I write across genres because the questions don’t care about genre. They just want to be explored.

If you’ve read any of my books, you’ve trusted me with your time and your imagination. I don’t take that lightly. These stories cost me something to write. I hope that investment shows on the page.

And if you’re wondering which book to start with, pick the question that won’t let you go.

—J.A. Raithe