The Spark

P.X did not begin as a book. For a long time, it was simply a story moving around in my head, its pieces not yet fully connected.

My curiosity about space and the universe went back much further. For as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated by the sky, the stars, and humanity’s place within all that vastness. Life, however, took me in another direction. I became a naval architect and marine engineer, and throughout my professional life I worked on ships, yachts, and large-scale projects. My days were filled with drawings, technical problems, meetings, schedules, production processes, and hundreds of decisions, large and small, that had to be made.

Science fiction, though, always stayed with me somewhere in the background.

About two years ago, my commute home from work took around forty-five minutes by train. After a while, instead of spending that time listening to music or playing games on my phone, I took my wife’s advice and started listening to podcasts. One of the first programs I came across was StarTalk.

StarTalk is a podcast hosted by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, covering subjects such as space, physics, astronomy, and humanity’s place in the universe in a way that is scientifically grounded but highly accessible. Tyson is often joined by comedian Chuck Nice, and their conversations, combining science and humor, quickly became a regular part of my train journeys.

As I listened, my mind began drifting elsewhere amid the pace of everyday life. Conversations about space, time, other civilizations, and humanity’s place in all that immensity began to reactivate ideas that had been sitting in the back of my mind for a long time.

One thought began returning more and more often during those journeys.

I wanted to write a story.

It was not really a matter of finding a new idea. Some of the ideas were already there. What would humanity’s first encounter with another civilization actually look like? If such an encounter truly happened, could it possibly be as simple as the versions we had seen in films? What if the civilization we met was not only technologically ahead of us, but millions of years older in historical terms? Was Earth really as important as we imagined? Or, conversely, could it be far more important for reasons we did not yet understand?

Over time, those questions began to connect.

There is a strange distance between carrying a story in your head and actually beginning to write it. Inside your mind, everything is much easier. Characters can remain vague, events can change whenever you want, and questions you cannot answer can be left for another day. The moment you put them on paper, however, they begin to become concrete. A character needs a name. An event needs a reason. A world needs rules.

Perhaps because I had spent years working on large and complex projects, I had some sense of what that meant. Once you truly begin something, you are no longer dealing only with the idea itself, but with all the questions and consequences the idea creates.

Even so, for a long time I was not someone who told himself, “I am going to write a novel.” Writing did not seem like a natural extension of my professional identity. I was a naval architect and marine engineer. I was a project manager who had built ships and large yachts and worked with complex teams in different countries. Writing a novel seemed to belong to an entirely different world.

Then, at some point, the question changed.

I stopped asking myself, “Can I write a novel?”

Instead, I began asking:

“Why am I not writing one?”

I think P.X began precisely there.

I do not remember a dramatic moment in which I thought I was making some enormous decision, nor do I recall saying, “Today I am starting something that will change my life.” It was simpler than that. At some point, merely thinking about the story I had been carrying in my head was no longer enough, and I began to write it.

At the beginning, I had no idea where it would lead.

I did not know whether it would become a single novel or something larger. I could not have imagined how far the world I now call P.X would expand, how many civilizations, histories, technologies, characters, and conflicts it would eventually contain. There were no covers yet, no printed books, no Vienna, no Ballhausplatz, and certainly no thought that one day I would sit down and tell the story of the journey itself.

There was only a story.

And I had finally begun to write it.