The Unification Chronicles

Let’s hop in the Way­Back machine and head back to 1994. I was still in the Air Force, work­ing at the Pen­ta­gon, and inspired by a renais­sance in SF sagas on TV — Baby­lon 5, Deep Space 9 — I’d been work­ing on my own sprawl­ing space epic, try­ing to get it all right in my head. It was big, and I was try­ing to make sense of it. The back­story went back a long way, dozens of mil­len­nia, involv­ing an ancient race of pro­tec­tors called the Guardians and a sin­gle hive mind of humanoid telepaths known only as the Neme­sis. After months of run­ning in cir­cles, I decided to put it aside and write some­thing else.

I’d recently been turned on to Christo­pher Golden’s Shadow Saga, which I still think are the best vam­pire books out there, and I’d read almost exclu­sively hor­ror in high school, so I fig­ured, why not write a hor­ror novel as a change of pace. I came up with an idea where our myths and leg­ends about angels and demons were based on real, flesh-​​and-​​blood immor­tals that had walked the Earth since the begin­ning of the human race, manip­u­lat­ing human devel­op­ment for their own rea­sons. That devel­oped rather quickly into Between Heaven and Hell, and I was well on my way to writ­ing my first actual novel.

But then, about ten chap­ters into the book, some­thing weird hap­pened. I’d never really given much thought to where the immor­tals came from, why they were the way they were. And as I wrote, it dawned on me I knew exactly where the immor­tals came from. They had been put here by the Guardians after the Guardians altered part of the Neme­sis to sup­press the telepa­thy. Humans were an off­shoot of the Neme­sis, and the immor­tals had been left behind as the shep­herds, installed with the Guardians’ own love of order. After a while, the brain­wash­ing failed in some of the immor­tals, and they reverted to a devo­tion to chaos as the only way to improve, the Neme­sis phi­los­o­phy. And thus explained the angels and demons.

I wasn’t writ­ing a com­pletely unre­lated hor­ror novel as a change of pace. I was writ­ing a pre­quel to my space opera, one set on present day Earth. But it was still sci­ence fic­tion, and still part of the over­all tale.

I want to stress that this wasn’t a con­scious deci­sion. I had no inten­tion of con­nect­ing the two sto­ries, and had set out to delib­er­ately avoid Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles for a while. But the story had a bet­ter idea.

Folks, don’t be afraid to lis­ten to the story. It will tell you itself where it’s going. And in some cases, like I dis­cov­ered with UC, it won’t let you go even if you try to walk away and do some­thing else.