The Visitors follows a man on the run at a settlement orbiting Mars who winds up involved with a mysterious box and an extraterrestrial. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

The original idea is from a dream. After I woke up, I jotted down notes and went from there. I’ve read too much Sci-Fi about fighting aliens. I wanted to get away from that.

I find the world you created in this novel brimming with possibilities. Where did the inspiration for the setting come from and how did it change as you were writing?

We’re now at the steep part of the exponential technology curve (assuming a valid single metric), and the only limit, outside of political/cultural reaction, is our imagination. I have to credit video games like Bioware’s Mass Effect series, Bethesda’s Fallout series, and Starfield. The idea of cooperative, if not always benign, aliens is very appealing.

As the writing progressed, I had excellent advice from my editor, Clete Smith, who kept me on track (I have a tendency to wander). He vetted story element plausibility, character relevance, and interaction. The idea of convergent evolution is handy for introducing aliens similar to us. While they are much more advanced in science and technology (they would have to be, to have gotten to Sol System), they too may still retain atavistic traits from their distant evolutionary past. The critical difference is they are no longer slaves to those traits.

For the foreseeable future, vast interstellar distances will restrict humanity to our solar system. In time, and with major breakthroughs in physics, this may change. At present, it seems at best a distant possibility. So here we are, colonizing the Sol system, for good or ill. After the moon comes Mars. And after that, who knows? But we’ll not likely go to Alpha Centauri any time soon.

What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?

Humanity has come a long way since the times of witch burnings and flat-earth nonsense. But we still have a long way to go. Cynical political players continue manipulating poorly educated people, convincing them that science is an evil plot or a hoax. Some believe we will never move past callousness and compulsive violence, but I can’t accept that. We are currently in an age where the mindless acquisition of money and power dominates the aspirations of too many people. It’s necessary to move beyond that.

Will there be a follow-up novel to this story? If so, what aspects of the story will the next book cover?

That depends on how much interest readers show in The Visitors. While I enjoy writing for its own sake, editing and publishing are expensive and time-consuming, and I don’t want to waste my time. Ideas for a sequel have occurred to me. One is having the main characters from The Visitors involved in recolonization efforts on Earth. That story would have less touchy-feely and a lot more action, but it’s not clear yet where it would go beyond that. I’ve read enjoyable books whose sequels flopped miserably, so I am hesitant.

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