Chemical engineer, more than twenty-five years in the energy sector. The Next Sun is his first novel.
The idea came to me in traffic, driving home from a game of squash. It was a Thursday. The following Monday, my holiday began.
I remember that sequence with a precision I rarely have for more important things. I got home and wrote it down, afraid of losing it. It was not a scene, and it was not a character — it was a question that had finally found the shape of a story.
The question was an old one. I was a child when I started reading about the pyramids of Egypt, about the theories that someone had come from elsewhere to build them. I spent years watching the Discovery Channel and the History Channel, feeding the kind of curiosity that is satisfied by anything promising the world is larger than it looks. I believe almost none of it now. But I kept the question underneath it: if the universe is so big, why does nobody show up?
Then came the more grown-up answers. The Fermi paradox. The Great Filter — the idea that there is some barrier almost no civilisation gets past. And, running alongside it, the subject that has occupied me professionally for more than twenty-five years: the race for alternative energy sources, the exhaustion of fossil fuels, global warming, demand that never stops climbing. Two curiosities I treated as separate until I realised they were the same one: intelligence costs energy, and energy runs out.
Perhaps the Filter is not ahead of us. Perhaps we are already inside it.
It was that sum that made me fall for the story — not its fiction, its plausibility. This is not a book about an imaginary danger. It is about a trap that strikes me as reasonable, built out of physics that exists, by people doing exactly what responsible people would do.
The holiday was twenty days long. The whole structure came out of it — the chapter list, the sequence, what had to happen and in what order — and a good part of the book with it. I did not write all day; I wrote in every gap that opened, and many opened. After that came weekends, over months, always returning to the same text to sharpen it. I did not quit my job and I did not lock myself in a cabin. The book was made in the hours left over, which is how nearly every first book is made.
At some point I understood that writing was only half of it. I found that I could work with real professionals — developmental editing, copy-editing, translation, cover art — and I set about learning how a book is published well on a budget that fits an ordinary life. That is what I am doing now. I have no publisher. I have a process, and I take it seriously.
I also work with artificial intelligence, and I would rather say so than be asked. It is with me at almost every stage: organising the schedule, comparing quotes, drafting emails in English to contractors, building the pages of this site, drawing symbols, and talking through decisions at length until I understand what I think about them. It is roughly the sounding board a published author has in their editor, and that an independent debut has with nobody.
What it does not do is decide. Every choice about this story is mine, and what called for a human hand went to human hands: the developmental edit with an experienced editor; the English translation with an award-winning literary translator who is a native speaker; the cover with an illustrator. I wanted a well-made book, and well-made books are still made with people.
As for what I hope from the reader, I have one ambition, and it is modest and difficult at the same time:
That this story can be told as though it were true — without cheap tricks, without sleight of hand, without blushing.
If you close the book thinking this could happen, that is why I wrote it.
I write back. If the book made you think of something, I want to hear it.