Building a believable far-future world means asking hard questions about where humanity is actually heading.
One of the most common questions I get asked is: how do you make the future feel real?
The honest answer is that you don't invent it — you extrapolate it. You take the threads of the present and follow them forward, as honestly and as rigorously as you can, until you arrive somewhere that feels both alien and inevitable.
For The Dust of Ages, I spent months thinking about what 700 years of human history might actually look like. Not the clean, optimistic futures of golden-age science fiction, but something messier and more human — a future that has solved some of our problems and created entirely new ones.
The political structure of the 25th century in the novel — the Interstellar Compact — grew out of thinking about how human governance might evolve after centuries of space colonization. Empires rise and fall. Democracies mutate. What endures?
I settled on something that felt like a cross between the Roman Republic and the United Nations: a loose confederation of planetary systems, perpetually on the edge of fracture, held together more by economic necessity than genuine unity. It's the world Samantha 'Deuce' Cordell was born into and trained to serve — and the world she's quietly losing faith in.
The technology in The Dust of Ages is advanced, but I deliberately kept it human-scaled. Cullen 'Boone' Barrett can understand a quantum weapon the same way he understood a Colt revolver — as a tool, as a threat, as an extension of human will. The names change. The principles don't.
That was the key insight: the future is still made of people. And people, across seven centuries, are still recognizably themselves.
One of the structural challenges of the novel was giving readers access to the 25th century without overwhelming them. Boone, as a man out of time, shares the reader's bewilderment — but Deuce is the guide. Through her eyes, the future becomes navigable.
Writing her was one of the great pleasures of the book. She knows exactly how strange her world is; she's just stopped noticing.