There Will Be Another Sunrise: @OBBookTours Guest Post - Nhys Glover

What Inspired Me to Write My Book

by Nhys Glover

The mystery of the Titanic inspired me to write The Titan Drowns. How was it that of the 2,223 souls on board her that night, each with access to a lifejacket, only 710 were rescued and 328 bodies recovered? That left 1,185 people, or more than half the passengers and crew, left unaccounted for. They couldn’t all have been below decks when she went down, could they?

So the mystery gave me the fuel I needed for my New Atlanteans to use.

The world of New Atlantis was inspired by what I see happening to our world. If we keep going on as we have for the last hundred or more years we’ll have destroyed the planet and ourselves. The last of us will then be traumatised survivors with access to all the technologies we’ve created. They might just be able to find a way to fast-track Earth’s regeneration using those technologies. That’s my hope, anyway.

In The Titan Drowns I allow Karl Ontario to express my views about what’s happened. He’s come to believe a Divine Hand is at work in man’s affairs. We’re saved from utter annihilation and left with the expertise we need to bring ourselves back from the brink by that Hand. The Last Great Plague, which some believed was a biological weapon gone rogue, kills 999 out of every 1,000 people. But the one that survives is often a person with knowledge that can be used by the new world, or abilities to help that world in some way. For instance, Karl worked on accelerated cellular development and clone research before the Last Great Plague. It’s his knowledge that keeps humanity going, in one cloned body after another, until it heals enough to start reproducing naturally again.

I think those survivors would all be suffering long-term Post Traumatic Stress. They’d be emotionally numb and hyper-cautious. They’d be terrified that change of any kind might lead to their final destruction. So, up until Cara heals Jac with her love and then starts the world’s rebirth by Retrieving children, my vision of the future has New Atlantis being a lovely, peaceful and perfect mausoleum.

By The Titan Drowns, which is the sixth in the series, but a stand-alone novel, my future world has undergone massive changes. And by the time they finish this mission, those changes have brought about the final healing. Like real life, once they stopped being afraid to die they really started to live.

All my books are also inspired by the desire to escape the mundane world. In the case of The Titan Drowns, writing it was like taking an extended holiday in the past. I lived every moment of the journey I described. It was the Ship of Dreams that turned into the Stuff of Nightmares, but up until that fateful moment when the iceberg hit, it was a grand adventure. Getting the chance to live that journey was inspiration enough to write this book, the love found and lives saved were just icing on the cake.