Jump follows two people struggling to keep their relationship together as they try to prevent their world from catastrophic collapse, while others are more interested in power and control than saving humanity. How did your vision for the series evolve as you moved from Hive into Jump?
I started with a simple idea: two people who screwed up their relationship get a second chance, courtesy of a time machine and the impending extinction of humanity. What could possibly go wrong?
Quite a lot, apparently.
By the time I finished Hive, I’d managed to destroy civilization, weaponize honeybees, and leave half my characters in situations that would require a miracle—or another book—to escape.
So I wrote Jump. Which was supposed to straighten things out.
Instead, I ended up with multiple universes, several versions of the same man, a time machine with a disturbing tendency to kill its passengers, and an artificial intelligence who thinks he can fix everything.
At this point, I’m beginning to suspect the problem isn’t with my characters.
How have Isabel and Diego changed since readers first encountered them in Hive, and what makes their relationship such an important emotional foundation for the series?
Isabel and Diego have loved each other for decades. Unfortunately, they’ve also spent a good portion of those decades making spectacularly bad decisions.
When we first meet them, they’ve been apart for fifteen years. Isabel has just divorced a billionaire who stole her research and treated her like an expensive appliance. Diego has been nursing a broken heart while trying to keep his perpetually cash-strapped NGO afloat. Clearly, these are two people with excellent judgment.
Then the world ends, and suddenly their relationship problems seem a little less important.
Except they aren’t.
Diego can repair almost anything, but he can’t fix Isabel’s grief. Isabel can program a swarm of microscopic robots, but she can’t make Diego stop trying to protect her. They’re stubborn, imperfect, occasionally infuriating people who keep choosing each other, even when the universe makes that choice almost impossible.
How does Isabel’s technology reflect the ethical challenges surrounding inventions that can be used for both beneficial and destructive purposes?
Imagine spending years inventing artificial bees to help feed the world. You finally get the technology working, and your billionaire ex-husband decides what it really needs is the ability to murder people.
That’s pretty much Isabel’s career trajectory.
The scary part is that nobody starts out announcing they’re going to build an army of killerbots. They begin with perfectly reasonable ideas. Better crop yields. Automated pollination. Protecting food supplies. Then someone suggests using the bees to defend the biodomes. And someone else decides the best defense is to eliminate anyone who might become a threat.
Before long, the tiny drones you designed to save the planet are exterminating its inhabitants.
I wish I could say this was wildly unrealistic, but humans have a remarkable talent for taking useful inventions and finding spectacularly awful things to do with them.
Isabel’s dilemma is that she can’t simply blame everyone else. At some point, she has to ask herself whether she’s willing to use those same weapons to protect the people she loves.
It’s a much harder question when the person standing in your way has a shotgun.
What larger themes or character journeys do you hope to continue exploring as the Madders of Time series progresses?
I always planned five books—and I know exactly how the last one ends. Getting there is the problem.
Three books in, the timelines are multiplying, my characters are scattered across several dying worlds, and a sixteen-year-old boy is trying to keep the entire multiverse from falling apart. I’m starting to feel a little sorry for him. I’m also beginning to think I need a better filing system.
One thing I love about writing parallel universes is that I get to take the same basic people and give them completely different lives. What if Isabel and Diego never broke up? What if the man who helped destroy the world had made one different choice? What if the person you love is still alive somewhere—but has never met you?
I also want to keep poking at our rather embarrassing human tendency to confuse wealth and power with wisdom. In my books, the billionaires build enormous luxury biodomes to ride out the apocalypse. Naturally, they hire the people who know how to keep everything running—and then ignore them.
But underneath the time travel, killerbots, and occasional naked physicist, I’m still writing about love, hope, and what we owe each other.
I’d like to believe we can save the world without sacrificing our humanity.
The multiverse is collapsing. The time machine is broken. And humanity’s last hope? Might already be dead. Seven months after the EMPs brought the world to its knees, a handful of scientists are racing against extinction—and each other. Somewhere in a flooded skyscraper lies a wormhole generator that might be able to undo the apocalypse. If they can find it. If it still works. If it doesn’t kill them first. Meanwhile, Diego Nadales wakes in a cell, his face bloodied and his memories fractured. He’s being accused of terrorism, treason, and time travel. The last one, at least, is true. Isabel is trapped inside a biodome ruled by the man she once trusted. But her bees—microscopic drones designed to save the planet—have been hijacked and weaponized. If she doesn’t find a way out soon, her creation will wipe out the last threads of life on Earth. Old friends return. New enemies rise. And somewhere in the chaos, one small spark of hope just might be enough to ignite a revolution. The clock isn’t ticking. It’s blowing up.
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