The Aurora Rift follows an evolutionary anthropologist who is transported through time by a mysterious fracture in the Northern Lights, journeying across civilizations and centuries while searching for a way back to his family. Where did the idea behind this novel come from?

The original idea for The Aurora Rift came from my fascination with two things that have always seemed almost made for each other: history and the unknown.

I have always been intrigued by the Aurora Borealis. We understand much of the science behind the Northern Lights: the interaction between charged particles from the sun and Earth’s magnetic field, but when you actually see photographs or video of the aurora moving across the sky, there is still something mysterious about it. It looks like a curtain separating o ur world from somewhere else. As a writer, I began asking myself a simple question: What if, under exactly the right circumstances, it actually was?

That question eventually became The Aurora Rift.

I didn’t want to write a time-travel story in which the main character simply pushes a button on a machine and selects a date. I wanted time travel to be unpredictable and even frightening. Kyle Richards is an evolutionary anthropologist, so history is something he has spent his life studying. Suddenly, instead of studying the past, he is trapped inside it. Everything he knows academically becomes a tool for survival.

But as the story developed, I realized the novel wasn’t really about time travel. It was about getting home.

Kyle can witness extraordinary civilizations, encounter people we know only from history, and see things that no modern human being was ever meant to see. Yet none of those experiences can replace Samantha and his family. That became the emotional heart of the novel.

It also allowed me to explore another idea that fascinated me: if someone traveled through history, could they truly remain an observer? Even the smallest interaction might change something. A footprint, a carving, a friendship, saving someone’s life, or simply being seen where you shouldn’t exist could potentially leave evidence thousands of years later.

That gave me the foundation for the novel: science, history, adventure, and survival on one side, and family, love, and the desire to get home on the other.

How extensive was your research for the different historical periods?

The research was extensive because I wanted the historical settings to feel like real places rather than backgrounds placed behind the characters.

Kyle moves through periods separated by hundreds or even thousands of years, and every transition required a different kind of research. I looked at geography, climate, clothing, weapons, transportation, food, social structures, warfare, trade routes, belief systems, and the practical realities of everyday survival.

The challenge was that history books often give us the large events kings, battles, migrations, empires, and dates but a novelist also needs the small details. What would Kyle smell when he entered a settlement? What would people be eating? What would he hear? How would strangers react to his clothing, his speech, or his behavior? How far could someone realistically travel in a day? What would constitute wealth? What would make people suspicious of an outsider?

Those details were extremely important to me.

The research became particularly interesting when Kyle’s journey crossed recognizable historical civilizations and figures. I wanted readers who already knew these periods to recognize them, while readers unfamiliar with them could experience history through Kyle’s eyes without feeling as though they were reading a textbook.

My goal wasn’t to put a history lesson inside an adventure novel. It was to make the history part of the adventure.

The research also extended into the science. The Aurora Borealis, geomagnetic disturbances, Earth’s magnetic field, and the possibility of unusual interactions between energy, space, and time gave me a scientific foundation from which I could push into speculation.

That distinction was important to me. I wanted readers to reach a point where established science ends, and fiction begins almost without noticing the transition. Obviously, The Aurora Rift is science fiction, but the best speculative fiction, to me, begins with enough reality that the impossible makes you stop for a moment and think: What if?

How did you handle the tension between historical accuracy and the needs of the adventure?

That was probably one of the most enjoyable challenges of writing the book.

I treated known history as the framework. If an important event occurred at a certain time and place, I didn’t want to casually change it simply because another version would make the scene easier to write. Instead, I tried to place Kyle within the spaces history didn’t record.

History tells us what happened on a large scale, but there are enormous gaps in what we know about individual moments and individual people. Those gaps gave me room to create.

Kyle can witness history without necessarily becoming the reason history happened. He can meet people, influence individuals, survive battles, travel with groups, and leave traces of himself behind while the larger historical record continues moving forward.

Of course, the deeper Kyle travels into the past, the greater the danger becomes that his presence could change something. That tension became part of the story rather than a problem I needed to eliminate.

Kyle gradually realizes that survival itself may alter history.

If he saves one person who was supposed to die, what happens to that person’s descendants? If he introduces an idea before its time, where does that idea eventually lead? If he leaves behind an object or a carving, could an archaeologist thousands of years later discover evidence of a man who could not possibly have been there?

Those questions allowed historical accuracy and science fiction to work together.

There were moments when the needs of the story required imagination, but I tried to make those moments plausible within the historical world surrounding them. I wanted the reader to feel that Kyle was moving through history rather than history rearranging itself conveniently around Kyle.

And sometimes the most dramatic choice was simply to let history remain history. Human history is already filled with extraordinary courage, brutality, discovery, ambition, survival, and tragedy. I didn’t need to reinvent those things. I needed to put Kyle close enough for the reader to experience them.

What would you like readers to remember most about The Aurora Rift?

More than anything, I would like readers to remember that beneath the time travel, historical figures, battles, science, and adventure, The Aurora Rift is a story about family.

Kyle experiences things that most people could never imagine. He crosses civilizations. He sees history alive around him instead of preserved in books and museums. He survives situations where one mistake could kill him centuries before he was ever born.

But through all of it, there is one constant: home.

Samantha and his family are his connection to the person he was before the Rift. The farther he travels through time, the more important that connection becomes.

I also wanted readers to think about time differently after finishing the book. We tend to look at history as something finished and safely behind us. But every person who ever lived experienced their own time as the present. They had families. They worried about tomorrow. They loved people, lost people, fought, survived, hoped, and dreamed without knowing how history would eventually remember or completely forget—them.

Kyle gets the extraordinary opportunity to see that firsthand.

And there is another question beneath the story that becomes increasingly important: If you could travel through history, should you interfere?

It’s easy to say you wouldn’t change anything. It’s much harder when you’re standing in front of someone whose life you might be able to save.

Ultimately, though, I hope readers remember Kyle’s determination to return to his family. He may be traveling across thousands of years, but emotionally he is trying to cross one distance: the distance between himself and home.

To me, that is what The Aurora Rift is really about.

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