I’ve always has a certain fascination with abandoned places. There’s just something so cool about seeing old places being reclaimed by nature. Living back in Connecticut, I remember exploring so many abandoned places like old factories with their roofs caved in, long stretches of highway covered with graffiti, and even an entire abandoned town. Each one of these places stuck with me and I found myself searching for similar things in every area I went to. As well as falling down the internet rabbit hole of cool abandoned places around the world.

And naturally when writing a post-apocalyptic story there was a lot of opportunity to bring my love of abandoned places into the series. We get to see remnants of the world before the apocalypse like old buildings now being reclaimed by nature, forgotten technologies, and so much more. All of which take inspiration from my love of abandoned places. But I think one of the biggest things that was always missing for me while exploring places like this or looking at old photos of them was I only ever saw them in their ruined state. All these places used to be alive. People lived or worked in them, spent years building them, long before they were abandoned.

One such place was Hashima Island in Japan. Sitting off the coast of Nagasaki, this concrete manmade island, nicknamed “Battleship Island”, had been featured prominently in almost every single blog about abandoned places and even showed up in some popular movies. All the old concrete buildings, long fallen apart and crumbling to pieces, are now completely overgrown by plants making it feel truly like something out of a post-apocalyptic setting.

Just after publishing Mercury, I had the chance to go to Japan and actually take a tour of the island in person. And while the visuals were just like I had imagined (concrete buildings overgrown with plants), the tour really opened my eyes to what life had actually been like on the island before it was abandoned. I got to learn about the history of the island as a mining outpost, what it was like to live and work there, how families spent their free time, what it was like to be on the island during a storm, and so much more. Suddenly it wasn’t just an abandoned island, but rather it was an island with a full and rich history before being abandoned.

When I was writing both Wardenclyffe and Mercury, that was exactly the feeling that I was trying to evoke with all the abandoned places. Not just that they were abandoned, but that there was also a rich history that had come before in each of them. And that by seeing a glimpse of the ruins, readers would get a sense that they were just seeing a small part of a much longer history.

I think my trip to Hashima Island really helped open my eyes to what I really want to show in my stories when I talk about these abandoned places. And now I can be a lot more conscious of it while editing the next two books in the series. And hopefully when there are more abandoned places in my stories, they feel just as rich and full of history as their real-world counterparts.