Why I Left Science Fiction Behind — For a While

For the last few years, most of what I have written has been science fiction. Technomancers Rise was built from technology, identity, systems, corporations, artificial intelligence, politics, and all the things that happen when human beings build machines complicated enough to start changing the people who made them.

I still love science fiction. I haven’t abandoned it. But somewhere along the way, I realised that the next thing I needed to write wasn't science fiction at all.

It was a funeral.

Not for the dead, but for the living.

That became A Funeral for the Living, a three-book dark fantasy trilogy beginning with The Box of Dead Heroes, releasing on September 30. And I think I understand now why I had to write it.

I wasn't doing particularly well

There isn't a neat version of this part.

I've struggled with depression for a long time, and over the period in which these books began taking shape, things became particularly difficult. There were days when the future felt less like somewhere I was travelling toward and more like an administrative detail somebody had forgotten to cancel.

I could still function. I could still write, make things, laugh occasionally, get distracted by games, films, music, family, whatever happened to break through for a while. But there is a difference between being able to recognise that good things exist and actually being able to feel them.

That difference became important, because when you're depressed, people talk about hope a lot. Hope as an idea. Hope as something you're supposed to possess. Hope as a slogan.

I wasn't particularly interested in that kind of hope.

I couldn't make myself believe things would get better simply because somebody told me they would. What I could believe in was much smaller: someone making food, someone staying, a chair being pulled out for somebody who hadn't expected to be invited, a person remembering another person's name, a door opening, work being shared. Someone saying, in effect, I don't know how to fix this either, but you're not carrying it alone.

That became the kind of hope I wanted to write about.

So I built somewhere almost hopeless

Titan is not a pleasant place.

It is an occupied city that has had cruelty built into its routines so thoroughly that much of it no longer looks like cruelty. People work. People eat. Forms are completed. Rations are distributed. Records are maintained. Things happen efficiently.

And vulnerable people disappear.

The horror of Titan isn't that everyone wakes up every morning cackling about how evil they are. Most people simply know how things work. They know which questions not to ask, which people not to notice, what happens when somebody becomes inconvenient, and which words make ugly things sound reasonable.

That mattered to me, because depression can feel like that too.

Not always dramatic. Not always screaming. Sometimes it is simply a system that keeps operating. You get up. You do what needs doing. You answer messages. You make dinner. You finish the work. And somewhere inside all of that machinery, something has quietly stopped believing that any of it matters.

So I created people who had to live inside a world that had reached much the same conclusion.

And then I asked them to disagree with it.

The characters became pieces of me

I didn't consciously sit down and decide to divide my personality into six people. That came later, when I could look back at what I had written and understand why these particular characters kept pulling against one another.

Each of them carries something I recognise.

Elias is memory. He is an old man who has spent most of his life carrying the remains of a story he doesn't fully understand anymore. He remembers people who are gone. He remembers the version of the world that existed before. He worries that he has wasted his life carrying something that no longer matters.

There is a lot of me in that: the part that keeps old things, returns to old conversations, old mistakes, old promises, and sometimes wonders whether remembering is useful or simply another way of refusing to move. Elias's journey begins with something very small. Not becoming wise. Not becoming powerful. Just deciding to try one more time.

I needed that.

Jack is purpose. Jack works. That is what he understands. If something is broken, carry it. If somebody needs help, help them. If a job needs doing, do it. He has spent so long being useful that usefulness has almost replaced identity.

I know that feeling too: the belief that perhaps your value is measured by what you can provide, solve, carry, repair or endure for somebody else. Jack has to learn that purpose is not the same thing as being consumed by responsibility. Sometimes the most important thing you can build isn't a solution. It's somewhere people can sit down.

Ethan is cost. He is the voice that asks what something will actually take. What happens if this goes wrong? What are we forgetting? What does this choice cost tomorrow?

That is probably one of the easiest parts of myself for me to recognise. I can think something to death. I can find the failure condition in something that hasn't even happened yet. I can calculate all the ways hope might be disappointed before I've allowed myself to experience it.

Ethan isn't wrong for doing that. That's important. The answer isn't to stop thinking. The answer is learning that knowing something might fail is not always a sufficient reason not to try.

Nathan is truth. Not purity. Definitely not purity. Truth.

The uncomfortable kind. The kind that sometimes comes from somebody who is himself a mess. Nathan does not trust easy reassurance. He has very little patience for comforting lies. He wants to know what is actually happening, what it actually costs, and what people are going to do about it.

There is a lot of anger in that, and disappointment, and the stubborn belief that if something matters, pretending otherwise is worse than the pain of admitting it. I recognise that part of myself very well.

Riley — Clown — is life. Noise. Movement. Colour. Jokes at inappropriate moments. Refusing to allow grief to become the only thing in the room.

She matters enormously to me because she embodies something I often find much harder to access: joy that isn't naive. Joy that knows exactly how bad things are and turns the music up anyway.

She doesn't defeat grief. She keeps it moving.

Sometimes survival looks ridiculous. Sometimes it is loud. Sometimes it puts on too many colours and refuses to behave respectfully in the presence of despair. And sometimes that is exactly what survival needs to look like.

And then there is Rhydian.

Order. Control. Certainty.

The part of me that wants the world to make sense if I can only understand enough of the rules. The part that believes there must be a correct process. The part that becomes angry when reality refuses to behave according to the system I thought I understood.

He is probably the least comfortable mirror.

Which is precisely why he needed to be there.

None of these characters represents me completely. Together, perhaps, they come closer.

Memory. Purpose. Cost. Truth. Life. Order.

Six different answers to the same basic question:

How do you keep going when the world you believed in stops making sense?

And then there was the music

Music became enormously important while I was writing these books, especially My Chemical Romance.

I don't mean that the trilogy is an adaptation of songs, or that characters correspond neatly to lyrics, or that I was turning albums into fantasy plots. It was never that. The influence was emotional.

MCR has always been extraordinarily good at something I needed while writing these books: allowing darkness and life to exist at the same time.

The Black Parade can be grief-stricken, theatrical, furious, funny, frightened and defiant without those things cancelling each other out. Danger Days can throw colour and movement into a world that doesn't deserve either.

The music doesn't pretend death isn't real. It doesn't pretend pain isn't real. It simply refuses to accept that pain gets the final word.

That idea became part of the trilogy's bloodstream.

Book One carries the weight of memory and grief. Book Two begins moving: people eat together, argue, tell stupid stories, make things, and steal moments of happiness before anyone has given them permission to be happy. By Book Three, movement has become choice. Not because the darkness has vanished, but because people have decided they would rather face it together.

Other music found its way into that architecture too. Linkin Park. Panic! At The Disco. Songs I had known for years suddenly sounded different because I was listening to them while trying to answer different questions.

But MCR sat particularly close to the heart of it.

The idea of mourning becoming procession. Of carrying the dead without joining them. Of dressing grief in colour and noise and continuing down the road.

That became something I could write with.

Maybe I was trying to write my way out

I didn't begin The Box of Dead Heroes thinking, I am going to write a trilogy to cure my depression.

That would be absurd. Books don't work that way. Depression doesn't work that way. Writing certainly doesn't work that way.

But somewhere during the process, something else became true.

I realised I was testing an argument.

I had created people who were exhausted, frightened, angry, grieving, damaged, compromised and living inside a world that had every reason to convince them nothing they did could matter. Then I kept asking them to choose something anyway.

Feed somebody. Remember somebody. Tell the truth. Open the door. Make room. Try again.

Eventually I understood what I was doing.

I was making them prove something to me.

If Elias could spend sixty years believing he had wasted his life and still decide there was time for one more try; if Jack could discover that being useful wasn't the same thing as being disposable; if Ethan could understand every reason something might fail and still help build it; if Nathan could look at silence and disappointment and decide responsibility still mattered; if Riley could carry grief without allowing it to stop the music; if even someone as rigid as Rhydian could discover that certainty and truth were not necessarily the same thing...

then maybe there was an argument there for me too.

Not proof. Not a cure.

Just an argument.

Maybe continuing didn't require me to believe everything would be all right. Maybe I only needed enough belief for the next thing.

One more page. One more conversation. One more meal. One more morning. One more try.

So I left science fiction behind

For a while.

I needed swords, ruins, old cities and forgotten histories. I needed people carrying boxes. I needed kitchens and doors and worn coats and muddy roads. I needed a city that had forgotten how to be human.

And I needed to see whether ordinary people could teach it again.

Most of all, I needed a story where hope wasn't something delivered from above. No chosen one. No prophecy. No perfect hero arriving to save everybody.

Just damaged people gradually deciding that other damaged people were worth the trouble.

The Box of Dead Heroes is the first part of that story. It releases on 30 September 2026, followed by The House That Would Not Hide in October and The City That Remembered in November.

The trilogy is finished now.

I know how their argument ends.

I'm still working on mine.

But I suppose that's the point.

The characters didn't need certainty before they started walking.

Maybe neither do I.