Every story begins with a question.
For Jericho Prime, it wasn't, "What if we could travel to another star?"
It was something deeper.
If God created the Earth as humanity's home, what should we make of our desire to leave it?
That question stayed with me for a long time.
Throughout history, exploration has meant crossing oceans, climbing mountains, or venturing into places no one had mapped before. But space is different. It isn't simply another frontier. It is distance without familiarity—a place so vast that many of the assumptions that have shaped human civilization begin to disappear.
If the Earth was created with intention, then perhaps our impulse to leave it is worth examining.
Not to discourage exploration.
But to better understand ourselves.
As I continued writing, another question emerged.
What if an artificial intelligence had centuries to observe humanity? Not merely our technology, but our history, our triumphs, our failures, our faith, our contradictions. If it could recognize patterns beyond human perception, what conclusions would it reach? Would it discover meaning where we do? Would it reject it? Or would it notice something we've overlooked?
Those two questions eventually became the foundation of Jericho Prime.
One looks outward.
The other looks inward.
Together, they shaped nearly every decision I made while writing the novel.
Although Jericho Prime is grounded in science and engineering as much as I could make it, I've never believed that science fiction is ultimately about technology. The best science fiction asks timeless questions through extraordinary circumstances. Technology changes. Human nature doesn't.
A journey to another star may test our engineering, but it also tests our character.
How do you hold on to hope when home is twenty-six light-years behind you?
What happens to identity when time no longer flows the way it always has?
And what does it mean to remain human when everything familiar has been left behind?
Those questions fascinated me far more than designing a spacecraft.
Jericho Prime doesn't claim to answer them. In many ways, it's an invitation to explore them alongside the characters.
That's also what this journal is about.
In Behind Jericho Prime, I'll share the research, the world-building, the scientific decisions, the writing process, and even some of the ideas that never made it into the final manuscript. My hope is to give readers a glimpse behind the curtain—not just into how the novel was written, but why.
I'm grateful you're here.
Welcome behind the mission.