I’ve just returned from an extended and wonderful trip to Hawaii. My wife and I try to get back every year, visiting one or two of the islands. Our favorite, our home away from home, is the Big Island. It has it all: Polynesian culture, volcanoes, rain forests, world-class observatories, the clearest night skies you could ever wish for, and no crowds.
On this trip, I spent several days promoting my novel and researching the next book in the series, Lost in the Multiverse. On both Maui and the Big Island, I signed books and read an excerpt from my novel at libraries and bookstores (yes, brick and mortar stores still thrive). The Hawaii Public Library system was excited to place Mauna Kea Rising in their collection since only a handful of science fiction books are set in Hawaii. The trip also gave me great opportunities to meet other writers and share “talk-story.” Many of them are also members of the Hawaii Writers Guild, a wonderful writers’ group. You can learn about my reading at the Writers’ Voices in Waimea event on the HWG webpage.
I find that researching story ideas requires being there, seeing the setting, smelling the air, and meeting people who have lived there for years. This rich immersion provides experiences that add verisimilitude to the story, those extra details that make the scene come alive. A couple of chapters in my next book take place in the remote Waipio Valley on the north shore of the Big Island. Exploring the verdant landscape from horseback gave me a good sense of what the main character might experienced after she arrived here for the first time. Before descending into the valley, we stopped at the trailhead overlooking the cliff face. A thousand feet below me, the waves crashed against the rocks, sending up white sheets of spray. Beyond the fresh and verdant jungle, the shoreline was a succession of cliffs and valleys as far as I could see. A pair of sea terns caught thermals and soared on air currents high above me.
After navigating a thirty-degree incline—I swear I would fall off at any moment—we reached the bottom. We rode on horseback past rice paddies, along still ponds that reflected sunlight like mirrored windows, and through groves of mango and monkeypod trees. The silence all around me carried the soft melody of the wind in the trees. In the distance, wild horses galloped in the marsh, spraying up rooster tails of water behind them.
The valley was once home to over four-thousand people. After the Second World War, a tsunami sent huge waves racing up the valley and swept away everything in their path. Now less than fifty people live here. We came to a taro farm beyond a gap in a grove of kukui nut trees. Settlers had used the mill to grind the leaves into a bland pink paste called poi. After many miles, we reached the back of the valley, surrounded by cliffs hundreds of feet high and streams fed from towering waterfalls.
I made a surprising discovery while researching a forthcoming book. As some of you may know, the Lost in the Multiverse series is set on a parallel world where the Hawaiian Islands sit between two superpowers, Japan and Great Britain. The speculative backdrop to the series came very close to reality in the late 1800s. The Kingdom of Hawaii originated in 1795 after King Kamehameha conquered five of the Hawaiian Islands. He later expanded into Kauaʻi and Niʻihau and united them all under one government in 1810. The Kingdom remained an independent nation closely allied with Great Britain for five successive reigns of the Kamehameha dynasty. During the Bayonet Constitution of 1887, American corporate interests forced the King to give up his power to act without the consent of his cabinet and gave the legislature, most of whom were white Americans, the power to veto the cabinet and the King. In 1893, the last monarch, Queen Liliʻuokalani, relinquished her throne to “the superior military forces of the United States.” What if a time traveler had intervened and prevented the U.S. from annexing Hawaii?