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The Collective
A Symbol of Time follows a dying alien civilization as it flees its poisoned homeworld and undertakes a perilous generational voyage to Earth, where survival may demand remaking an entire planet. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I’ve always been uneasy with neat explanations for events that occurred before recorded human history. The idea that dinosaurs vanished because of a single catastrophic event is a tidy answer to a question that can only ever be fully answered in the deep past. It is a narrative we impose on incomplete evidence. Pairing that unease with my fascination with the possibility of an intelligent past on Mars became the foundation for A Symbol of Time.
The book follows an entire society as it wrestles with extinction. What interested you about telling a collective story rather than focusing on one protagonist?
Extinction is never experienced by a single person. I wanted to show how responsibility gets diluted when it’s shared, and how even well-intentioned individuals can participate in outcomes but the their contributions die with them. It’s the collective that has the greatest impact.
The novel raises difficult questions about survival at any cost. Was there a moment where you personally struggled with the choices your characters made?
Yes, especially when the choices stopped feeling dramatic and started feeling practical. The hardest moments might, on one hand, have seemed like acts of cruelty and indefensible, but on the other, were decisions that seemed reasonable in the circumstances. Those are the ones that bothered me, because they’re the kinds of choices people actually make under pressure.
What question from the book still lingers with you personally?
Whether a civilisation has the right to preserve itself if doing so fundamentally alters or harms another world. Whilst this is probably a question the human race will never get to answer, it was interesting to ponder. Who gets to decide what “necessary” means, and who lives with the consequences decades later. I don’t think the novel answers that question, and I don’t think it should.
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Their home is cold and dying, choked by the toxins of their own progress. Now, an advanced alien species looks toward the Third Planet—Earth—with hope and fear. They see a fertile paradise, but one that is hostile, hot, and dominated by massive, predatory reptiles.
The choice is stark: die in the heat, or remake this new world in their own image.
As they descend to alter the climate and purge the planet of its prehistoric masters, they set in motion a chain of events that will echo through geological time. A Symbol of Time weaves palaeontology and astronomy into a chilling tale of survival. As the new masters of Earth terraform the planet, the question remains: does high intelligence inevitably carry the seeds of its own destruction?
