Hello, fellow travelers,

There's a strange alchemy that happens sometimes when you're a writer. You sit down to relax watching a Netflix show about three women investigating their former classmate's death in Northern Ireland, and somewhere along the way your brain starts finding parallels between what you're seeing and a brutal revolutionary movement in 1980s Peru. And then, almost before you realize it, those lines are running straight through the novels you're writing.

That's where I've been living these past few weeks. Below, I'll tell you all about How to Get to Heaven from Belfast, and what it cracked open in my thinking. But first, the news.

📡 The Entropy of Trust: It's Done, and You'll Get It First.

The second Seela Atherton story is finished, and you, members of this mailing list, will be among the very first people on planet Earth to read it. For free.

Here's what it's about:

Before the link goes out to you, I have to apply the improvements that my writing group, a remarkably talented, caring, and refreshingly ruthless bunch, offered to me with their signature blend of warmth and surgical honesty. Once I've worked through their feedback and done a final copyedit pass, the story will land in your inbox. Just a few more weeks to go!

I'm genuinely excited about this one. If the first Seela story was about what it costs to compete, this one is about what it costs to trust… and whether that cost can ever really be calculated in advance. Also, this one's brimming with nail biting action. Stay tuned.

⚙️ Thorn of Concordia: Copy editing Has Officially Begun!

In what I can only describe as a moment of profound relief: Thorn of Concordia has entered copy editing.

Tina, my copy editor, has received the manuscript, complete with my umpteenth corrections, and will begin her final review in the next week or so. After that, just a few more weeks stand between us and a final-final-final manuscript, at which point we move into typesetting and the book starts looking, well, like a book.

I'll have more to share on timelines soon. For now: it's happening.

🎤 Upcoming Event: SFWA Nebula Conference AI Panel

This Sunday June 7th I'll be in the room virtual for a panel discussion titled "Opting In, Opting Out: Making Human Choices About AI in Writing Software" at the 2026 Nebula Conference, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association's flagship annual event. Since I'm a member of SFWA's AI and Emerging Tech committee, I'll be joining my colleagues to discuss the impact of artificial intelligence on authors, and how our association is working to support writers as they navigate the genuinely difficult questions of how to engage with this technology: where the opportunities are, where the lines should be drawn, and what protections writers need as this landscape keeps shifting, while not losing sight of the opportunities of the technology. It's a conversation I care about deeply, and I'm honored to be part of it. I'll report back with anything interesting that comes out of the discussion.

📺When Belfast Echoes Ayacucho: How an Irish Comedy-Thriller Mirrors Peru's Buried Conflicts

A Mini-Review of How to Get to Heaven from Belfast

Lisa McGee, the creator of Derry Girls, has done something remarkable with her new Netflix mystery/comedy series. On the surface, How to Get to Heaven from Belfast (2026) is a dark comedy about three thirty-something women investigating the apparent death of an estranged friend. It's funny, fast, and full of McGee's trademark bittersweet laughs.

But underneath the jokes, it's doing something far more ambitious. By quietly interrogating how Irish society copes with its recent past (something McGee also brilliantly explored in Derry Girls), the show ultimately makes the case that the past still invisible shapes modern society and peoples' lives, and that it is hard to truly "move on."

I watched the show over a couple of weekends and couldn't stop thinking about it, not because of Belfast, but because of Peru. And that prompted the idea to share some thoughts about the parallels between this show and that country's past, and between that past and the SF stories you're here to learn more about.

A Buried Collective Trauma

A major theme you'll find in my upcoming novel Thorn of Concordia is the existence of a buried collective trauma within society, one that results in a rickety edifice of lies.

The single most powerful structural choice in How to get to Heaven from Belfast is this: the central mystery revolves around a catastrophic event from twenty years ago that the characters have collectively buried. They built entire adult lives on stories they told themselves to survive. And when the truth resurfaces in later episodes, it doesn't just solve a mystery, it also unravels their identities: The women discover that much of what they "knew" about a traumatic episode in their youth was false. Their identities were, quite literally, based on bad information, on lives built on a lie.

This is the story of Peru's internal conflict in miniature. Between 1980 and 2000, the Maoist insurgency of Sendero Luminoso (the Shining Path) and the Peruvian military's counter-insurgency campaign resulted in approximately 70,000 deaths. When Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación, or CVR) published its final report in 2003, the number stunned the urban capital. The conflict was concentrated in the Andes highlands among Quechua-speaking indigenous communities who comprised 75% of the victims. So, for my country's upper and middle classes, the war was something that happened to other people, in other places.

Talk about "identities based on bad information."

How does this translate to space-operaish hard-SF, particularly the one you expect to read when following up these emails? Well, without going into spoilers (you're waiting to read the book, after all!), in Thorn of Concordia, Seela Atherton begins life as a member of Concordia's hereditary elite. In the aftermath of a terrorist bombing she unwittingly got herself involved in, Seela finds that the narrative of her participation gets rewritten to protect her family's political standing. At that moment, Seela's memories become buried truths, and the novel's tension comes from the inevitable surfacing of those truths (and the secrets hidden by those truths), and the earthquake they will generate.

Identity as an Indelible Tribal Marker

Another major theme in these writings concerns Identity as a marker that, in most cases, cannot be deleted. There's a punchline in How to Get to Heaven from Belfast that succinctly captures this, when one friend tells to another: "DNA doesn't wash off. It's like Catholicism."

In Northern Ireland, being "Catholic" or "Protestant" was not only about theology; it was also a tribal marker, a shorthand for which community you belonged to, which streets you walked, which version of history you inherited. The show makes this explicit through characters whose sectarian identity shapes their daily lives in ways both comic and constraining, long after the 1998 peace agreement supposedly made such divisions historical. Similar identity fault lines segment Peru, only they're not about religion, but about race, language, geography, and economic position within the societal ladder. The colonial sistema de castas was legally abolished with independence in 1821, but its legacy has persisted in accent, skin color, surname, and neighborhood. During the Shining Path conflict, the CVR documented this explicitly: the conflict's victims were overwhelmingly poor, indigenous, and Quechua-speaking, and this was not a coincidence. Their deaths appeared to matter less to the centers of power because of who they were.

For Thorn of Concordia, I decided to bake the identity system within both the story's setting and plot. Seela's world is divided between Founders, the hereditary elite descended from Concordia's original colonists and everyone else: second-generation immigrants, conscripts, commoner laborers. Seela's change of identities within the novel symbolizes both her shield and her prison (if you still don't know about Seela's multiple identities, download her first prequel short story, First Among Liars, and soon the upcoming The Entropy of Trust, for more). In addition, Seela can only slip between identities because she has the resources to fabricate them. Her commoner friends, both existing from the short stories and the new ones, have no such luxury, and thus have no choice but to uselessly fight against what the novel calls "Concordian Gravity," the invisible societal force that raises Founders and pushes everyone else down.

Which begs the question: Can the system be changed for the good? Or are we condemned to live within it?

Obsessive Belief as Weapon (or, The Price of Absolute Certainty)

In a recent interview about the show, Lisa McGee shares this insight about one of the supporting characters: "I liked that [a character] believed in something — and that sometimes believing in something very hard can be very dangerous."

This is the thesis statement of the Shining Path conflict.

Sendero Luminoso was perhaps the most ideologically rigid insurgent movement of the late 20th century. Abimael Guzmán, who styled himself "Presidente Gonzalo," the "fourth sword of Marxism" after Marx, Lenin, and Mao, demanded absolute doctrinal purity. Dissent was treason, and villages that refused to support the revolution were massacred: at Lucanamarca in 1983, 69 villagers were killed by Sendero as "punishment" for resistance. Guzmán later acknowledged these killings with chilling matter-of-factness, calling them "a necessary demonstration." The movement's true believers, many of them educated young people from provincial universities, committed extraordinary cruelties in service of an ideology they held with religious fervor. However, the state's response was equally shaped by dangerous beliefs, such as the conviction that counter-insurgency justified any means, and thus that certain lives were expendable in defense of "civilization." The military massacres at Accomarca (1985) and Cayara (1988), for example, flowed from this logic.

In short, both sides believed. And when ordinary people are caught between absolutisms, they usually pay the price.

I am attracted by the idea of evil nesting within the apparently solid structures of non-doubt. In Thorn of Concordia (minor spoiler) the main villain turns out to be someone with the iron conviction that terror is necessary to achieve peace. And Seela's father, Headfounder Thomas Atherton (whom you've met in the short stories), has a different kind of belief embedded in his maxim, The House Must Come First. His willingness to sacrifice his own daughter to maintain political leverage is not cruelty for its own sake, but the ruthless logic of an institution that has elevated its own survival to the status of moral imperative.

As Seela's arc progresses during the novel, she achieves her own kind of certainty, a certainty tempered by doubt. And as all these beliefs clash in the climax, the reader will be asked to wonder if this is the kind of clash for which there can really be a winner, or if ordinary people (including those Seela cares most about) will be ground between the millstones.

Because in a universe made of painful tradeoffs, is there truly such a thing as "the right decision"?

Conclusion

I didn't set out to write about Peru when I started my novels. I set out to write science fiction that felt real, that had the weight of actual human experience beneath its speculative surface. But none of us can escape who we are, and the more I wrote, the more I found myself drawing on the conflict I grew up around, the social fractures I witnessed, the layers of history and myth and silence that make Peru what it is.

Watching How to Get to Heaven from Belfast was like seeing a European mirror held up at an unexpected angle. McGee may be writing about her place, her history, her people's trauma and resilience and dark humor, but the structures she's working with (buried collective guilt, identity as inherited cage, the terrible cost of absolute belief, and the slow painful necessity of confronting truth) are universal architectures of human conflict.

These structures share a lot with the fictional world of Thorn of Concordia. In fact, the entire narrative engine runs on them: Founder houses layering privilege over colonial-style exploitation; conscripted immigrants treated as cannon fodder; memory-wiping political deals that protect the powerful; And Seela's arc, which I won't spoil here, but will only say it exemplifies the fact that confronting buried truths is the only path to reconciliation, whether for a friend group, a nation, or an empire.

And if a comedy-thriller about three women in Belfast can hold all that weight without collapsing, can make you laugh and think and ache simultaneously, then I think space science fiction can do the same with the echoes of an 80s Latin American conflict.

But don't take my word for it! You'll have a chance to find out very soon.

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That's all from me for this edition. As always, thank you for being here, for reading, for caring about these stories, and for being the kind of audience that makes writing feel like it's worth doing.

Until next time,

L.E.