This short series of posts is designed to provide some insight into my writing process and the story behind A Visitor to the Future. My advice to the reader is not expect anything deep or significant here - these posts will mostly be a stream of consciousness, designed to document some of my thoughts about concepts we've explored in the novel.

In this case, we're exploring a little bit of the background of the novel itself.

History

The vast majority of my readership for the novel arrived here from reddit, which was where the first part of A Visitor to the Future was created. On November 14th, 2021, I responded to a writing prompt, which really kicked off the idea in my head that I could actually start and finish a novel. Writing prompts on reddit are designed to give writers a concept to write around, which readers can then enjoy.

My response to that prompt was really well received, and at the time was one of my most popular reddit comments. You can read the original response here - this single comment, and its two follow-up comments now form the bulk of chapter one of the novel. I did diverge from the prompt significantly in the end but it is important to recognise it for what it was. It motivated me to put ideas into words.

It was only after I published it that I received some really nice comments asking me to continue writing the novel - so I did! And I've been doing that for almost two years at the time of writing this post (August 2023). I'd like to have finished the novel by now - but that will have to be the subject of another post.

As an aside, I sometimes go back to those comments on the initial parts if I ever doubt myself, they were really nice and I'm really grateful to those people who did.

One question I sometimes get asked is how I pulled this concept out of thin air - how did I create something from nothing here?

The answer is that some of it wasn't new. Sure, a lot of elements were pulled together in the spur of the moment - for example, Sarkona Grant suddenly jumped into my head (thanks Sarkona!), and my decision to respond to the prompt in the first-person writing style has influenced every word I've put on the page (fun fact, I actually prefer third-person narrative for the most part). However, the concepts I explored within that initial prompt response are some of those which I have explored dozens of times in other short pieces of writing, whether in response to writing prompts I have made on reddit, in my own private writing, or simply in my own head.

One of these pieces of writing was called A Post-Human Crisis. And in a slightly different world, you might have been reading it instead of A Visitor to the Future.

A Post-Human Crisis

In about 2020 I began putting together a rough structure for a novel - or as I call them, a skeleton - which I alternated between calling A Post-Human Crisis and A Post-Human Dream. In the end I settled on the former as it really was not much of a dream. I put together excerpts for the novel, wrote passages, tried to develop characters, and at the same time come up with a central plot which would allow me to weave a complex and cautionary tale about a world that might be.

The plot was essentially the following:

A human born without augmentations tries to find their way in a complex and warring solar system, torn between the various factions of humanity who each firmly believe that their approach is the best one.

The novel was set much further in the future than my final novel concept - around the year 5,000 in our current calendar. The key factions were the following:

• An unaugmented human underclass who reside within the slums of Earth, Mars, and the Jovian Moons. They eek out a meagre living under the watchful eye of those of more advantageous upbringing.
• A spacing society heavily reliant on technological implants for suvivial in space.
• A civilization of synthetic lifeforms intent on the construction of a dyson swarm, who maintain an uneasy peace with the remainder of the solar system.
• An isolationist industrial society of Titan who are no longer recognizable as either human or human-evolved beings.
• A group of individuals who have decided to leave the Sol system entirely, despite the hazards of interstellar travel at slower-than-light speeds.

Some of these ideas have been directly adapted into my current work. For instance, I did a lot of research on the kinds of techologies that I would expect each society to end up utilizing in day-to-day life. This methodology of exploring near-future technologies based upon existing scientific knowledge would be exactly how I built my ideas of the Consortium's industrial base.

I intended to explore many themes throughout the plot including what it means to be human, how future technologies might change how we see ourselves, how external pressures may affect colony development, and so on.

What happened?

So, the shrewd reader is asking themselves, why is it the case that I get to read A Visitor to the Future instead of A Post-Human Crisis?

I can't say precisely why but my best guess at the moment is that A Post-Human Crisis was a depressing mess to write. Each time I put words on the page, I felt like I was only adding to that depressing mess, which is why the skeleton never really got fleshed out beyond the research and drafting phase. To be frank, A Post-Human Crisis would never have been written.

Writing is a significant time investment. It is something that I have to motivate myself to do, ideally frequently. When the subject matter is not something compelling or something I'm not personally invested in it becomes much, much harder. When you throw in the fact that I am not a full-time writer, that means that nothing gets done - other things take priority. So the ideas and work that I put together lay in one of my writing folders, on rough notes, and in a few pages idly drafted.

However, one of the truly beautiful things about writing is that very little of it goes to waste. The imagination loves to recycle. So in 2021 when I saw a writing prompt about a person being cryogenically frozen and waking up a thousand years in the future, the ideas which had been churning in my head seemed to spill out onto the page. Things suddenly snapped into place! Suddenly I could see a way to write about some of the subjects that I wanted to. I think it was a combination of things - exploring the ideas in my head from a more optimistic standpoint (i.e The Consortium), the first-person narrative allowing a clear explanation to the reader of what was going on around Nat, and the lens of cryogenics allowing exploration of how a future society might address aging without the associated dystopia of the Post-Human factions mentioned above. Also, the positive feedback from readers really helped when I first decided to start the novel - no joke, I think that helps a lot.

Those first few months of writing, it was like a floodgate had been opened. I was extremely consistent for a time in writing updates every day, and ideas took shape. The synthetic lifeforms building a dyson swarm merged with the oppressed humans to form CIs, the spacing society formed the basis of the Kesslerites, and so on. It very quickly became hard to draw the distinction between the old and the new - and that is when I realized that the recycling of my old ideas had led to new, better ones - true innovation. It was about that time that I though I should write up a post explaining how the novel came to pass and a little bit about the novel skeleton that wasn't - and here we are, over a year after that, with me finally getting around to writing it.

To sum up I personally believe that A Visitor to the Future is a better piece of writing, but equally I recognise that might be an unfair comparison to make given how developed one is compared to the other.

Wrapping up

To wrap up this post, I'd like to share why I've been thinking about this subject lately. A Post-Human Crisis was my piece of writing that never got made. It was a thing that might have been, had things turned out differently. However it also makes me grateful for what I have created so far - and even though A Visitor to the Future is taking far longer to finish than I'd like, I'm looking forward to what my own future will bring.