This series has a backstory, and it’s a weird example of how a writer’s mind works. Especially one whose mind is crammed with random historical odds and ends.

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I WASN’T TRYING TO THINK OF A STORY IDEA, I was just ruminating—call it daydreaming if you will—and out of some recess of my brain I thought of the King’s Own Regiment, the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, the King’s Own Calgary Regiment… you get the idea.

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And for some reason, my mind started playing with that, replacing King with Emperor, because you might as well go up the food chain rather than down, and then I tried out several now forgotten combos of Emperor’s Own Whatevers. I finally hit on Emperor’s Own Orphans.

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THIS BEGGED THE QUESTION: WHY WERE THEY ORPHANS, AND WHY WOULD THEY BE AN ELITE “EMPEROR’S OWN”? The thought of some type of janissary came to mind, so I fastened on that. I wanted this to be non-exploitative, unlike the historical janissaries, so I had to come up with a way for them to become orphaned, and then to become the Emperor’s Own, which led to what their duties would be…

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WELL, I HAD TO BUILD A WORLD WHERE THEY FIT. I knew it had to be near future to make it more accessible and real, even to me. So there followed the creation of a pretty detailed 300 years of future history, mainly to inform myself of what kind of world would have an empire that would use the services of the Emperor’s Own Orphans.

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I DIDN’T PUSH THE WORLD-BUILDING. I JUST TOOK TWO HISTORICAL TRENDS AND EXTRAPOLATED THEM. One is the ongoing tendency to balkanize the world. How long will it be before there are independent states in what is now Spain? And why should the Great Powers be immune to this tendency, which is gaining steam even now? Empire builders are not making much progress. The lines between factions in even one country are becoming so great that the description “It’s really two countries now” is becoming common.

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Related to this is the other macro-geopolitical tendency for the great divisions to move further from a resolution. Israel and Palestine. Hindus versus Muslims in India. Many varieties of Islam in the Middle East. North Korea is not falling anytime soon, and it is not going to reunite either.

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Along with those macro geopolitical issues, IT SEEMED LOGICAL TO ADD ANOTHER TENDENCY, AND THAT IS THE ONE TOWARDS MORE PANDEMICS of various kinds—I simply extrapolated from this tendency to a swarm of pandemics arising from the exposure of all of the once wild Amazon to outside exploiters.

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WHAT WORLD WOULD THAT LEAVE? I didn’t try to force a preconceived notion of what was good or bad, just what might happen to the world if those tendencies continued and were, perhaps, exacerbated by my imagination.

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SO, I HAD MY WORLD.

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BUT WHAT ABOUT MY EMPIRE? It had to be something I was familiar with, which meant North America. I’ve been to 49 states and most of the Canadian provinces, so that came into my thinking. But the springboard for the nascent Empire was when I reflected on the fact that British Columbia certainly seems to have more in common with Washington State and Oregon and even parts of California than it does with eastern Canada. Why not start out the empire with a cross-border alliance that became the first part of a growing empire?

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BUT WHAT WOULD MAKE THIS EMPIRE DIFFERENT THAN ANY OTHER? I early on got the idea of having the Empire borrow the mythos of a benevolent (it wasn’t really, that why I said mythos) British Empire, due to it being the greatest (largest) in human history.

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But that’s just window dressing. What was going to make it different?

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That’s when I came up with the idea for THE PHILOSOPHY OF SACRIFICIAL GOVERNANCE. I wanted to have a truly different kind of government, a new, never-before-tested kind of government. Once I came up with two basic points: (1) if you want power, you are disqualified from exercising it, and (2) the people should not be indoctrinated, they should be left alone. The rulers, the governors, they are the ones who should be indoctrinated—into the Precepts of Sacrificial Governance.

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THE PRECEPTS OF SACRIFICIAL GOVERNANCE ARE APPENDIX I IN THE PILGRIM INITIATIVE. As you read it, you may come across ideas that piss you off. I’m sorry, but the Precepts are not my idea of a utopic government. They are simply the extension of the “if that, then this” thought process. The Precepts went in a bunch of different directions I didn’t expect, but I wanted them to fit the internal logic of this world, not start some kind of political movement here IRL.

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Once I had a history, a few maps, the Precepts, and two or three characters, I dove into the writing and let the internal logic of the world and the characters take me where they wanted to go.

 

RESEARCH IS NECESSARY EVEN FOR FICTION: PILGRIM SERIES BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

I made good use of Google to determine the differences in time zones, the difference between a frigate and a destroyer, the top speed of a submerged submarine, maps of all the countries I was dealing with, and so on. Using the internet to search for instant answers was a godsend compared to the old days of dead-tree research.

 

But to really get the information and grounding I needed to write these books, I FOUND IT NECESSARY TO DO A LOT OF REAL, HEAVY RESEARCH.

 

I read these books before beginning the task of putting words to Word, and they were invaluable.

 

• An Historian’s Approach to Religion, by Arnold Toynbee (Oxford Press)

• At the Court of the Borgias, by Johann Burchard, translated by Geoffrey Parker (Folio Society)

• The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, by Paul Kennedy (Random House)

• The Rise and Fall of the British Empire, by Lawrence James (St. Martin’s)

• The Habsburg Monarchy, by Robin Okey (St. Martin’s)

• Of Arms and Men, by Robert L. O’Connell (Oxford)

• Secret Service—33 Centuries of Espionage, by Richard Wilmer Rowan, with Robert G. Deindorfer (Hawthorne)

• Through Our Enemies' Eyes/Imperial Hubris, by Michael Scheuer, (Potomac Books)

• The E-Bomb, by Doug Benson (Perseus)

• Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond, 2005 Edition, (W.W. Norton & Co.)

• The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran (Alfred A. Knopf)

• The Colonization and Establishment of Liberia, by Charles River Editors

• The Liberian Civil Wars: The History and Legacy of the Deadly Conflicts and Liberia’s Transition to Democracy in the 21st Century, Charles River Editors

 

I can recommend all these books to those of you interested in imperial history.