The bestselling author sets The Photonic Effect in the 24th century in the midst of a galactic civil war.
This is your first space opera, correct?
Yeah. My editor, Nivea Evans, reached out and asked if I wanted to try something more science fiction than the speculative stuff I’d been doing. And I’m a huge fan of space opera. For anyone who has watched Star Trek Voyager, it very abruptly ends without any catharsis for the crew after they’ve been on this long journey home. I remember thinking, What would happen next? What’s the story after that? I thought it would be interesting if a crew like that came into a situation where, like in my favorite Star Trek series, Deep Space Nine, there’s a galaxy-spanning civil war going on. So they come back from being displaced and find that they’re at war with each other. That was really the inspiration: what if Voyager met Deep Space Nine?
How did you make it your own?
I wanted to use the setup to create a real-world mirror. As we can see in February of 2026, government responses to crises aren’t always the best. The way I thought about it was, if you had a group of people who were stranded on a desert island for 10 years, and they came back and found the state of the world as it is today, they would be like, What is happening? This doesn’t make any sense. That’s the vibe that I was going for, where this crew is trying to process their trauma of being stranded and they’re basically told to go into this war that they don’t feel is just. And trauma responses form differently for each person, which I tried to show with each of the main point-of-view characters.
You’ve also cited Mass Effect and Robotech as inspirations. How did they influence you?
Mass Effect is a video game series with incredible writing and character development, and it’s also looking at one of the first things that I looked at when developing this book, which is, how do you make a unique faster-than-light travel system? Then Robotech is an anime series from the ’80s that’s basically about a multigenerational war over an unexpected energy source, but there’s also a lot of downtime with the characters and that’s what still sticks with me. How are these individual characters facing this gigantic science fiction situation, and how is that affecting their relationships?
What was the most challenging part of writing this novel?
Just the worldbuilding in general. I enjoy experiencing other people’s worldbuilding, and it’s really fun to play in IP because I get to naturally expand what feels logical for me. But to come up with it all on my own? The government factions, the faster-than-light technology, the ships, the alien species all had to be unique. It’s very taxing on my brain.
