This question comes from new reader Jenna R. in Columbus, OH: 

I downloaded the free sample of The Politics of Fear and devoured it in one night. I was blown away. What was the inspiration for this series?

Thanks for the question, Jenna, and for being here. Your email was the highlight of my day. Mark your calendar for July 7, 2026 when the full novel will be published.

When folks ask about inspiration, I think they’re generally asking for a list of other works and writers that influenced the book. I will provide that info, but I think it’s worth first acknowledging the personal milieu that actually fed this wild space opera’s genesis.

I started writing The Politics of Fear at a time when I had reached peak frustration with the traditional publishing ecosystem. I had just been through a frustrating back and forth with an editor about The Girl Who Woke the Moon, and my first literary agent dropped me as a result of my stubbornness. At that time, I was very driven to land a publishing contract with one of the Big Four houses, and I was writing to market in a way that wasn’t entirely healthy. I’d received enough rejection, acceptance, and feedback to read the trends, and I thought I could ride them to success (Note to writers: Don’t do this).

I’d heard it all. Editors don’t want long books. Editors don’t want multiple POVs. Editors want stories that compare (read: copy) the current bestsellers. Editors want to see certain tropes and don’t want to see others. Editors don’t want long series. They do want series. They want the first book to stand alone in case it flops. They want the first book to end on a cliffhanger. They want authors to check x, y, z identity boxes. They want writers who are still marketably young.

It’s all bullshit. If you’ve spent any time in the publishing trenches, you’ve probably started to identify some or all of these patterns, but it’s all a mirage born of frustration and market contraction.

I stuffed The Girl Who Woke the Moon in my proverbial trunk and began writing a new project with a chip on my shoulder. I decided to write something unpublishable. I would break every rule I thought the industry was trying to force on my efforts and embrace a story that I wanted to tell. The kind of story that I wanted to read. Even if that meant it would have an audience of one.

I realized pretty quickly into the first draft that something strange was happening. I was actually having fun. The Politics of Fear was fun to write and fun to read. As I neared the end of the first draft, I started to think this book might have a bigger audience than just one–that it might even be the kind of story a lot of people want to read.

It would be a couple years and another literary agent before I finally took matters into my own hands and launched HTP. In that time, some more trad publishing stakeholders nibbled on The Girl Who Woke the Moon and the Tales of Ciel. I showed a previous draft of The Politics of Fear to my agent at the time, and they roundly rejected it for all The Reasons. Too long. Too many storylines. Too many POVs. The response was so at odds with the gushing reviews from beta readers, many of whom insisted it was the best book I’d written at the time, that I started thinking that maybe I should be the one to decide what was publishable.

That experience is the real inspiration for The Compact Cycle. 

Classic space operas, a modern comic series, and political biographies inform the series

The Politics of Fear is predominantly a space opera, one of my favorite genres to read. It also borrows elements from weird fiction and political thriller. My brain is such a soup of mixed media that I always have a hard time pinpointing exactly which works exert influence over which creative projects, but a few leap to mind as likely suspects.

My favorite space operas live rent-free in my mind, so I’m sure they all bled into the drafting process. Frank Herbert’s God Emperor of Dune, James S.A. Corey’s Expanse series, Ian M. Banks’ Culture novels, Peter F. Hamilton’s Night’s Dawn trilogy, and Brian K. Vaughan’s Saga comic series all taught me crucial aspects of craft unique to the space opera. Saga in particular expanded the boundaries of what I thought possible in the form. Like the Vandermeer and Mieville novels that shaped the way I think about fiction, Saga gave me permission to step outside the box and explore higher dimensions. 

In The Politics of Fear, I give you scheming AIs, little green men, and polymorphic insectoids, but I serve it alongside an eleven-dimensional entity that communicates through scent, a psychoactive algae with collective intelligence, and a galaxy-spanning predator organism that manifests emergent personalities within the greater whole

That’s all setting, though. As the title suggests, The Politics of Fear is a political thriller at its character-driven core. The galaxy is a strange one, but the problems of democratic decay, political corruption, and cooperation across cultural lines transcends genre. To research this series, I picked up Sarah Vowell’s delightful Lafayette and the Somewhat United States, Robert Dallek’s comprehensive biography of LBJ, Evan Thomas’ Being Nixon: A Man Divided, and George Crile’s Charlie Wilson’s War, which was adapted into a great Tom Hanks movie.

Protagonist Mats Hyyland is an amalgam of many famous political figures, though all characters are strictly fictional and any resemblance to real people is entirely coincidental [/legal]. He’s Churchill and he’s Nixon and he plays the legislature like LBJ. He’s also Charlie Wilson, fighting a war that nobody cares about through illicit channels, and managing it between professional dalliances and illegal cigars.

I hope you like him.

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