The Dementia’s Origin Story
While The Dementia is my first novel, I've been writing fanfiction for 25 years and one theme that has emerged in my long stories is how our heroes relate and live in the community around them, and how their communities shape them. Thinking about communities and how they evolve in the petri dish of a generation colony ship — or better yet four that end up in radically different places — is actually where the story came from.
My original idea was actually about the societies that emerged on each ship 700 years post The Dementia. The Dementia was always the Big Event in the past that set the four ships onto different paths: Grace had people as memorizers to preserve information, Destiny the writing on the walls, and Peace fractured into dozens of hostile communities and is basically a failed state. (Hope remains mysterious.)
The problem I had in that time period was I couldn't figure out a story to show off my world. I kept coming up with ideas that felt contrived, and lots of side stories from the distant past. But the societies all diverged because of the Dementia event. So that's where this world found its footing in a story.
As I started to dive into the plot, I also knew that I wanted to have the kind of inspirational teamwork that are in two of my favorite movies, Apollo 13 and The Martian. You have your space disaster, you have people in trouble, and you have a whole lot of people working the problem to help them out. I just love how it's people coming together, the best of people, the smarts of people — how those stories show how people around the world rallied and cared about the fates of the astronauts hundreds of miles away.
Astronaut Mark Watney on the side of a building, from the movie The Martian.
The world today feels, and in many ways is, quite dark — and yet, people do still care. They care about the war in Ukraine, in Gaza, they care about climate change, and its impacts, they care about the economy failing people. That's why everyone is depressed and anxious, because they care about the disasters happening to themselves and other people. They want to help and feel helpless.
I wanted to write a story where that caring is rewarded, where it ends with a win. Where these communities on these ships are ready to help each other and work together to save themselves and each other. It's a collective effort instead of one lone hero doing everything, because that's what humanity's greatest moments are all about, the ones that make you proud to be human — the stories of rescue efforts, when the internet rises up for good, building the biggest telescope to look into the universe and getting it into space and having it deploy perfectly (that's the James Webb Space Telescope, btw, and it's amazing). These are not hero moments, they're community as hero moments, and I love them.
So those were the driving themes I was thinking of as I put the story together. A lot of others came out in the writing, of course, along with the terrible side of humanity too. We are complicated and varied creatures, and that's one of the things I love exploring through writing.
