The Cycle of the Serpent follows a cursed mark across eight eras of human collapse, as each civilization’s greed, violence, and complacency awakens a monstrous force that asks whether judgment can save humanity or doom it. What drew you to the idea of linking historical collapses through a recurring supernatural “correction”?

My background is in systems engineering and biological sciences, so I tend to view history not as a linear progression of dates, but as a complex system of feedback loops. In biology, when a system becomes unstable or toxic, an immune response is triggered to preserve the whole. I wanted to apply that ‘systems thinking’ to human civilization. What if our recurring collapses aren’t just bad luck or political failure, but a planetary immune response? Linking these eras through the ‘Entity’ allowed me to explore the terrifying idea that humanity isn’t the master of the world, but a component that is subject to reset whenever our collective greed threatens the planetary baseline.

How did you choose the eight eras featured in the anthology, and were there any collapses you considered but left out?​

I chose the eras based on the ‘Peak and Precipice’ rule. I wanted moments where a society felt it was at its absolute zenith, whether that was the survivalist triumph of an Ice Age tribe, the decadent peak of the Roman era, or the high-tech hubris of 2026. Each era represents a specific flavor of human failure: complacency, greed, or the blind pursuit of power. I did consider including the fall of the Khmer Empire at Angkor, as their water management systems are a fascination for an engineer like me, but I ultimately left it out to ensure the narrative felt geographically global and spanned a full 12,000-year arc without becoming repetitive.

How did you balance the moral clarity of the premise with the ambiguity of whether the corrective force is justified?​

This was the most challenging part of the ‘Hard Science’ edge of the book. To the ‘vessels’, the individuals caught in the reset, the Entity is an unspeakable monster. It is violent, final, and seemingly cruel. However, from a systems and biological perspective, a forest fire is a catastrophe for the individual tree but a necessity for the health and future of the forest. I wanted readers to wrestle with that discomfort: Can you call a force ‘evil’ if it is the only thing preventing a species from completely destroying its own habitat? The ‘moral clarity’ comes from the recognition of our own flaws; the ‘ambiguity’ lies in whether we believe we deserve the survival we’ve been given.

What is the next book that you are working on, and when will it be available?

I am currently finalizing a project that feels like the natural, much darker, evolution of the themes explored in The Cycle of the Serpent. It is a work of autofictional cosmic horror, a narrative that bridges the gap between the grounded, high-stakes reality of the industrial engineering world and the existential dread of ancient, unknowable forces.

While The Cycle examined the macro-system of historical resets, this new work turns the lens inward. It’s an intimate, visceral look at what happens when a person who understands how the world is built begins to see the cracks in the reality behind it. I am still wrestling with the final title. While The Shadow of the Dragon has served as the working name, the story is demanding something that better captures its specific brand of suffocating intimacy. I am aiming for a Fall release in October 2026, a timeframe that feels appropriate for a story meant to be read as the days grow shorter.

Closing thought/statement:

I write for the reader who suspects that history is a series of resets, existence is a reincarnation trap, and that true freedom only begins when we stop being components of the system and find the hand on the control wheel.

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