What you just read started as a wildly different story in my twelve-year-old mind. As you’ll soon see, it underwent many changes over many years and many drafts, but key elements have stayed consistent throughout.
Here are some of the highlights.
Factions
I originally planned for a much larger assortment of factions on Alpha Cen, including the Edish, the Roaches, the Enlightened Ones, the Swamplanders, the Mariners, the Quarrymen, and the Dreadtroopers. However, I soon realized that it was unlikely that the population would have grown enough to support so many different groups in just fifty years. (The original ACI mission only had about 2,500 colonists.)
Each group had its own history, features, and alliances. For example, the Dreadtroopers were basically Jedi knights running around the wasteland, using wormholes to jump around the galaxy. However, the modern Edish, Roaches, and Enlightened Ones are not too different from my original idea.
(Well, maybe the Enlightened Ones are, but you’ll have to wait until the next book to learn more about them.)
My desire to have all these different civilizations stemmed from my obsession with Star Wars and a firm belief that a writing project would become boring if the idea didn’t get larger every time you talked about it.
I talked about it a lot.
The Corruption
The earliest iteration of the Corruption was something I temporarily called the Dead Zone (a nod to The 100 TV show!) or the Blight. It was a single strip of corrupted land on the Enlightened Ones’ side of the subcontinent. The most interesting thing about it was that time worked differently when you were inside.
Sometimes, a person would walk inside it, and a hundred years would pass on Alpha Cen. Other times, a person could be inside for a year and have only a month go by on Alpha Cen. The explanation I came up with was that the edge of the Blight was a wormhole. It led to a planet called Barrow, which had been devastated by the nuclear war that wiped out a civilization 100,000 years beforehand.
Barrow’s star system orbited a black hole, so time was heavily dilated there. In the original plan for Book 3, Zach and crew needed to cross to the other side to save Cora’s life. Zach would have found ruins of that old civilization inside the Blight, along with wormholes that led to other planets. I created an entire language for the civilization that was going to be on the other side of one of them.
You can probably already see the similarities between the Blight and the Corruption, but let me explain how the transition occurred.
First, I moved the location of the wasteland and made it periodically expand. There’s no longer time dilation inside the Corruption, but the rapid aging effects of the Threshold are a remnant of that idea. Zach’s crew still needs to travel inside that wasteland, but the reason is different—Cora doesn’t need saving (yet). The Threshold surrounding the Corruption is still a wormhole, but it was created by human technology, not an ancient alien race as I originally planned.
The Time Jump
This is one of the crazier aspects of the original storyline.
When I started writing the Zach Croft series, I intended it to be five books instead of a trilogy. At the end of the third book, there was going to be a massive showdown with the Enlightened Ones that severely irradiated Zach, Cora, Ryker, and Halsy. To save them, the others were supposed to put them in cryo to detox the radiation from their bodies.
This cryo detox was only meant to last for a few weeks, but the Enlightened Ones stole the cryopods and hid them in the Blight. (There’s a reason for this, but it wouldn’t make sense without more information about the Enlightened Ones.)
It took thirty-five years for Zach’s people to find the cryopods and open them, by which point a legitimate country had formed on Alpha Cen—the Hominium Republic. This society was a federation of the different settlements and outposts previously held by the various factions. The capital was New Eden (the first was destroyed) at the site of the former Enlightened Ones’ city. The center of military operations was Blackwing, but it was named Brutus. Each of the country’s ‘states’ had its own specialized industry, much like the districts in The Hunger Games.
And get this: Mabel was the president.
Yes, Mabel Liora was originally going to be mentored by Agnes Crow and step into her shoes upon her death. Rhea Vasquez was also alive at this point, though she’d long retired from military service and was causing problems for everyone. Carver was long dead (or was he?).
Also, the military domesticated and militarized scalemongers.
Boom.
Badass.
Carver and the Ipah
Initially, humans weren’t the only intelligent life on Alpha Centauri. There was supposed to be a species of four-armed, snouted beings called the Ipah on the other side of the Blight. These aliens lived in pyramids and took pride in their harmony with nature. I had a vague idea about Ipah being able to control the life around them to ensure peace, which sounds suspiciously like a hive mind.
The Ipah were supposed to come into play in Book 4, with Zach’s crew needing their help to defeat a new type of enemy. Upon reaching Ipah territory, Zach discovered that a disaster decades before had caused the creatures to move underground. So, Zach and his friends went there. And what did they find?
A massive bronze statue of Nicolas Carver, whom the Ipah called Nikolaka.
See, Carver was a member of an early search party that went into the Blight to look for the missing cryopods. Remember how I said time in the Blight was strange? Well, Carver got lost in the Blight and popped out the wrong side of the wasteland—a hundred years earlier. This was before the Ipah moved underground, so they found Carver and took him in.
During the following years, he kept diaries, hoping his friends would eventually stumble upon the Ipah and figure out what happened to him. After about ten years, Carver discovered that an Ipah cataclysm was about to take place—he was the guy who suggested they move underground.
Thereafter, they treated him like a hero, hence the statue.
If this all sounds very confusing, that’s because it is.
Also, the name “Ipah” came from a randomly generated village name in the phone game WorldBox.
Paladin
Aside from the Ipah, I planned for a sentient species on one of the moons of Paladin, accessible through a wormhole in the Blight. These beings did not belong to a truly novel species but an offshoot of humanity.
Let me explain.
On the way to Alpha Centauri, the ACI experienced a coup. The rebellion was squashed, but Mission Commander Baylor Crow wasn’t sure what to do with the hundred-and-fifty insurrectionists. He didn’t want to kill them, so he put them on their own transport ship and directed it to the Blight while the other ships landed in more favorable areas. The criminals wandered for a while before they found a wormhole and walked through it.
They popped out on a lush moon of Paladin and established a civilization there.
But after seventy years, they didn’t have much genetic diversity. As a solution, one of them—a biologist named Kru Pen—figured out how to create blank DNA templates and bolster the population. Over time, genetic editing became part of their culture. They gradually altered themselves to be better suited to the moon.
Then, after a few hundred years—time moved faster there—they ventured out and colonized a host of other planets, optimizing their genes for each one. They formed a nation called the United Federation of Inhabited Systems or the U.F.I.S.
That’s the species I created a language for.
Two sentences of that language are as follows: “Morkai, kine tok gro ni. Ma futorr vollo tok ni yuoro.” Which translates to, “Hello, nice to meet you. I am going to talk to your mom.”
The Concord
During the summer of 2023, I listened to Discord by The Living Tombstone every day while thinking about Us Before Them. The word ‘discord’ can be defined as disorder and conflict between groups of people. That, of course, fits the plot of Us Before Them very well. When naming the ACI’s spaceship, I called it the Concord because concord is the opposite of discord. All of the groups on Alpha Cen came from the same place—concord—and fell into discord.
The War
I came up with all the lore for the twenty-year conflict between the Edish/Roaches and the Enlightened Ones while standing with my dad outside a brunch place in Big Bear in November of 2021. I originally came up with all the battles that took place, the names of different commanders on both sides, the names of official diplomatic documents, etc. A lot of that actually made it into the earliest drafts of Us Before Them. But my dad—who is my designated bad writing detector—soon pointed out that people care far more about how those conflicts affect the present day than whether Agnes Crow used a 0.5 or 0.7 mechanical pencil to sign a peace treaty.
Zach/Ryker
In the earliest draft of The Forgotten Colony, Zach and Ryker were the same person.
Literally.
There was a single character named Zach; Ryker didn’t exist.
Eventually, I realized that Zach acted incredibly calm and intelligent at some points and dangerously irrational at others, so I split him into two separate characters.
And thus, Ryker Gagarin was born.
Irogen
When I was twelve, irogen was insane.
Originally, the Prescott Colony didn’t exist for mining—it was just a Mars colony. While there, Zach and Ryker discovered irogen.
So, what was the first thing they did with it?
They started injecting it into people.
Somehow, irogen magically healed all sorts of human illnesses and injuries. But after a few weeks, all those people injected with the suspicious Martian substance got sick and died (the Red Plague before I came up with the Red Plague).
Who could have seen that coming?
Soon, Zach and Ryker were the only people left in the colony.
My mom wouldn’t let me stay home alone when I was ten, and they got a whole Mars colony to themselves? Wack.
After a while on Mars, Zach and Ryker discovered that irogen could also be used as rocket fuel! How? I don’t know! Why? I thought it was cool.
So, Zach and Ryker pumped some irogen into a dropship, flew it to the Gateway, and headed back to Earth.
Good readers of the Zach Croft series, this is why you do multiple drafts of a book.
As I revised The Forgotten Colony, irogen’s rocket fuel properties and infectious qualities were split into two separate things: irogen and the Red Plague. Yes, they’re still linked by the fact that the Red Plague biomines iron to produce irogen, but they’re definitely not the same. Also, finding irogen wasn’t a coincidence—that’s why OSE sent the Prescott mission.
The whole Red Plague phenomenon is one of my favorite parts of The Forgotten Colony—I think it’s so interesting. But never forget that it emerged from an absolute fever dream.
Putting It All Together
Writing this bonus content was a lot of fun, since I haven’t had a chance to revisit my original ideas in quite some time. That’s natural for authors—as the drafts fly by, we’re forced to cut more and more of our most outlandish ideas. Yes, this usually creates a better story in the end, but there’s always something sad about deleting an entire alien civilization from a book.
By including this information, I want to demonstrate to you—readers and writers alike—that no story emerges fully formed. Often, the idea you start with barely resembles the finished product, but there are always bits and pieces that linger behind.
Think about it like your relation to your grandparents. You might not look particularly related, but perhaps you have the same eye shape or curl pattern in your hair. The Blight may no longer exist in Us Before Them, but the Corruption is its worthy successor.
If you’re writing a story, you should never feel discouraged when cutting content. The inevitable trimming of the plot is why you need to have a huge, far-fetched story to begin with.
And who knows? Maybe some of the content you remove can’t be added to your principal series, but it’ll have its own standalone story someday. I certainly consider writing a story about the Paladonians.
Just be creative.
Be a little bit crazy.
And, at the very least, you’ll have some fun stuff to write about in the bonus content of your finished novel.
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