Oh, HEY! Since Serial #2 of Relics of The Fallen released yesterday, we thought we’d have a chat with Nick and find out the story behind the story, why he wanted to write his début novel.
“The idea of the idea of explosive remnants of war, obviously, is a thing that interests me professionally. I wrote my master's thesis on land mines.
“The idea of a weapon that can hurt or kill or ruin someone's day, years, decades, maybe, maybe hundreds of years after a conflict—I mean, we still find Civil War ordnance once in a while, you know?—that intrigues me—that you can fire a weapon now and in 150 years, it might kill someone. You know after the war is over, whom you've never met you know in a country that might not exist yet. That's fascinating to me. It's always been
“So I thought about that concept, but at scales across millennia, and what would happen if we figured out that this ball of dirt where we are is or was in the past a battlefield or an outpost or a FOB, a forward operating base, from a past, you know, intergalactic or interstellar conflict? I found that really interesting.
“And so I thought, what would what would modern bomb technicians do? How would we handle it if we found unexploded ordnance from the distant past that wasn't produced by maybe these humans that we're familiar with here, or maybe they weren't produced by humans at all. Where are they from? How do we deal with them if they don't even obey what we think of as the laws of physics or thermodynamics? How do you deal with that?
“So it opens up a lot of interesting questions, physically and chemically and scientifically, but also just how do you deal with it on a personal level, and what would that unit look like, and what would their policies be? I don't get into budgetary issues or anything like that, but it's the application in the field work and planning that really appealed to me, so it's a story about special unit that deals with these pieces of ordinance that they don't know you don't know at first, where exactly they came from but. but we've never seen them before.”
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