Inspiration for the Extinction Series (5 books): an dystopian Science Fiction

Where do ideas come from? Years ago, I met a drugged-out hippy that believed ideas came from invisible bubbles that float all around us, when one hits your head, you're inspired. That's kinda silly, yet their origin does seem almost mystical. Authors pretty much agree that inspiration starts with a question: what if?

I grew up as an only child in the wilderness of the Santa Cruz mountains in California. With no other kids around, I had nothing to do until my uncle taught me to read at age 3. Since then, I've read thousands of books of all genres, but my favorite category while growing up was Science Fiction.

Sci-Fi has no limits and is an extremely malleable genre, within it romance, murder mystery, thriller, horror, military, and every other type of story can be told. It's the genre of futurists and freethinkers, yet is unlike fantasy because the stories and technology must at least be plausible. The genre often looks into the future, Orwell's 1984, Huxley's Brave New World, and Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 are all works of science fiction. It's a speculative genre as well, predicting advances in technology, changes to our society, governance, culture, and even evolution.

Back in the 1960s, I was around a lot of hippies, beatniks, and free thinkers, many of which speculated about the future of humanity. Hippies, in particular, seemed to believe that we would evolve into spiritual beings that wouldn't need a body – well, they took a lot of acid (LSD), so that kinda thing should be expected. Yet still, those overheard conversations planted seeds of inspiration.

So, the what-if question of the Extinction series was, if humanity manages to survive how will we evolve? Our kind does have a penchant for self-destruction, we need look no further than the evening news for proof of that. But if we continue to exist long enough, what might we become and what will we leave behind? Will advances in artificial intelligence create beings that become tired of their petulant creators and wipe us out or will they simply leave us behind? Or, what if the hippies were right and we are bound for a future beyond imagining?

For my Extinction Series, I borrowed from Professor Michio Kaku's books, learned about artificial intelligence, and listened to Stephen Hawking's lectures about possible faster than light travel. The five novels speculate about the inevitable evolution of ourselves into something more than we are and also explore what and who we might leave behind.

Individually, the books are mostly about conflicts among our kind, but when left alone and without rancor or jealousy we may become better versions of ourselves. Of course, humanity will go kicking and screaming all the way, but sometimes, that's the way evolution works.

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