Hello again, dreamers. It’s been a while since I made one of these posts, and I’m happy to be back at it.

There is one small problem, however: I do not currently have a formal work-in-progress, at least not as far as novels are concerned. Right now, my efforts are focused primarily on short fiction and worldbuilding. But as I will soon be querying Pioneers, I thought it best to devote this post to some background on my most prized work.

The Story Behind Pioneers

Pioneers is a work of hard science fiction. Set beginning in 2122, the story follows a small group of characters, led by biologist and survival expert Randall Holmes, as they establish a colony on a planet orbiting the star Megrez, eighty light-years from Earth. As they arrive, the planet in question is passing through a period analogous to Earth’s Maastrichtian Period. Thus, the planet’s dense forests are populated by various species of dinosaurs.

Most of my longtime readers will already be very familiar with the basic premise of Pioneers. It’s been the focus of my work for years. However, few will likely realize just how much this story has changed, and how different the final product was from my original concept.

It was around 2011 or so when I first hit upon the idea for the series of novels that begins with Pioneers. I was working on background notes for a story idea that would have taken place much further into the future, but while fleshing out the story’s lore, I began writing about the “Pioneer Wars”, which within this story’s framework would have been a distant historical event. Yet, as I worked on the background notes, several of the characters I created began to take on a life of their own, most notably the Pioneer revolutionary leader Randall Holmes. I became enamored with the idea of a rustic pioneer hero whose struggle against Earth’s authority was motivated by conservation: the desire to protect his planet’s native biosphere from environmental catastrophe. Over time, I added to his personal backstory, establishing that he’d begun as an astronaut, and had been stranded alone on an alien planet where he’d been forced to survive for years before being rescued.

Eventually, I abandoned my original idea, and decided to focus on Holmes and the Pioneers. Thus, the Pioneer Saga was born.

I settled on an idea for an opening novel, with Holmes as one of several thousand colonists settling a planet orbiting the star Phecda. My first attempt didn’t go very far: I managed only a few pages before abandoning the project in frustration. I then decided to begin the series even further back, with Holmes’s ill-fated first mission as an astronaut. That story, which became Pathfinder, made it a little farther, but ultimately fizzled out after a few chapters. In the end, my frustration with both stories, and the series concept in general, led to me shelving the whole thing. Instead, I ended up working on a long-standing side project. That project became my first novel, Wide Horizon.

Anyone who has read Wide Horizon will know, first and foremost, it is a very, very different story from Pioneers. It’s a space opera set in the far future, with science fantasy elements, intense drama, mysterious technology, and over-the-top villains. But through it all, Wide Horizon‘s primary value to me was as a proof of concept: I could write a novel. I could put together an entire book with my ideas. I could do this. I wasn’t really interested in writing soft sci-fi. My goal was still to return to the grounded, science-based world of Randall Holmes and the Pioneers.

So, with Wide Horizon behind me, I sat down to resume writing Pathfinder. Unfortunately, my second attempt didn’t go much better than the first. After over a year of frustration, I reluctantly returned to the original colony concept.

The original story was at first titled simply The Colony. What little I wrote and worked out of the story involved several major characters:

Randall Holmes: the protagonist, a former astronaut and a cold, unfeeling man. Holmes was originally to lead a faction of colonists looking to break ties with Earth, as they were far enough away to not need any assistance from their home planet.

Lydia Foley: A biologist with the colony group (originally Holmes was purely a survival expert). Foley was to be Holmes’s love interest before evolving into their main antagonist, leading an opposing faction of colonists who believed it was foolhardy to sever ties with Earth.

William Flanders: a young ecologist, brilliant but woefully naïve and helpless in the face of survival situations.

Franklin Bedford: the genial, wise-cracking commander of the colony ship Mayflower.

Robert Ashe: a radical separatist, who with a group of co-conspirators was responsible for the destruction of the Mayflower, and ultimately became the leader of the pro-independence faction before being usurped and killed by Holmes.

When I returned to the story, a lot changed. I was dissatisfied with a lot of the characterization, and most of the main characters. I didn’t like the simplistic plot. So, I did something I usually try not to do: I threw everything I’d written away, and started over. I took a completely new direction with the story, and while I was able to salvage a few passages from my initial attempt to flesh out the early chapters, it wasn’t long before this new story took on a life of its own. The Colony (or Samarkand as I’d eventually renamed it) was gone. Pioneers was born.

Soon, the characters changed. Holmes evolved into a more likeable character: a broken, deeply flawed, but inherently good man. The original Lydia Foley character came to feel too misogynistic. Ultimately, she ceased to be an antagonist, and her role in the story was split into two characters: the new Lydia Foley, the colony’s wry-witted, no-nonsense chief biologist, and Nina Stark, a member of the colony ship’s crew and Holmes’s eventual love interest. William Flanders was converted into an African American character: William Ford, a biologist who was still innocent, but whose characterization focused on his enthusiasm and eagerness to grow and learn, rather than Flanders’s bumbling incompetence. Robert Ashe was scrapped entirely, replaced in his role by Niels Larsen, Holmes’s right-hand man. And while Franklin Bedford survived the cut, he was transformed from a cocky, wise-cracking flyboy into the dry, irreverent, often irascible commander of the Susan Constant.

Over the course of writing, Pioneers did the two things I’ve found any really good story will do: it took on a life of its own, and it surprised me. The characters became their own people, their relationships often evolving in ways I hadn’t originally intended. The result was exactly what I’d hoped for: a riveting, believable, surprisingly human-centric story. Free from the booming exposition and harrowing space battles of Wide Horizon, Pioneers was grounded, and in that grounding it found its footing. It became less a sci-fi story and more a humanist story with a sci-fi backdrop. And with that, I finally found something I’d been searching for, something I hadn’t been able to find through all of Wide Horizon:

My voice.

Querying a novel takes time. It could be years before Pioneers finds its way to bookshelves. But when it does, I hope my readers enjoy reading it even half as much as I enjoyed writing it. – MK