Halidom Origins

Blue-Collar Themes in Sci-Fi

Kodak Park and a Union Family

Halidom's working-class grit comes from growing up near Kodak Park in a skilled trades family. My father belonged to Local 13, Plumbers and Steamfitters. Most people we knew worked for Kodak, Xerox or Bausch and Lomb. That upbringing shaped how I saw work, machinery, and infrastructure, especially the people who build and fix things.

You can feel that vibe throughout Halidom. The villagers maintain the city and understand it better than the people living in the towers. That helped me craft one of the story's central contrasts: the folks who keep a system running are rarely the same people who benefit from it most.

The Environment of Halidom

"Perfect" Crops

Halidom was influenced by real efforts to engineer "perfect" crops for higher yields, pest resistance, and longer shelf life. It sounds like a good idea: alter a seed to help feed more people. But who decides what perfect means? And what happens when the engineered solution begins destroying everything around it?

Invasive Species

Kudzu was the main idea behind the Bloom. When I first moved down to North Carolina, I saw it covering everything. Houses and trees hidden underneath a living green carpet. Kudzu is invasive and nearly impossible to stop, and there is something weirdly alien about it. In Halidom, the Bloom is much larger, more aggressive, and way more dangerous. But both carry the same unsettling idea of nature claiming whatever it wants to.

Cloud Seeding

Cloud seeding also fed into the creation of Halidom: the real-world attempt to create rain by introducing particles into clouds. Weather is one of the least predictable forces in nature, and yet we still try to control it. Halidom built its survival around a daily rain cycle. But control creates dependency. Once an artificial process becomes part of the infrastructure, people assume that it will always keep working.

Genetically Modified Organisms

I’m not a fan of altering a bug's DNA to solve a human problem. Genetically modified insects have been developed to reduce disease-carrying populations by interfering with their reproduction. Recent history shows us that things don't always respect the boundaries set in a lab.

The science is different in my book, but the basic idea tracks. The "Rootbane" beetles were engineered for one purpose: to consume the Bloom and stop its spread. Once they eat all the vine, they look for other things to feed on.

Technology, Knots, and Hidden Networks

Knot Theory

Knots have interested me since my brothers and I learned to tie a Trilene fishing knot up at Black Lake. If a bass yanked the hook off your line, you never heard the end of it. Now, we just miss the days when we could tie one without wearing glasses.

A knot solves a physical problem. It can secure a fishing hook or join two ropes. But I learned that it also preserves knowledge. The sequence and shape matters. If someone knows how to read the knot, they can reproduce the process.

Old Telecom Infrastructure

I work in communications. "Whisper Nodes" came partly from years of thinking about the infrastructure that most people never notice. Networks depend on equipment hidden in closets, mounted on poles, buried underground, or hiding in plain sight. Some of it remains long after the original network has been replaced or forgotten. That led me to wonder what would happen if pieces of a system survived longer than the people who understood them. In Halidom, dormant devices can harvest tiny amounts of energy and communicate through an old distributed lattice.

The network is still there. Almost no one remembers why.

Hierarchies & the Tribalism That Divides Us

Office Hierarchy

In the late '90s, I worked in downtown Rochester on one of the middle floors of Xerox Square. People would actually ask what floor you worked on. The higher you were, the more important you were assumed to be. I always thought that was wrong.

Political Division

The book was also influenced by watching politics divide people who often have far more in common than they realize. Once people sort themselves into opposing tribes, labels and loyalties begin to matter more than the important stuff. Family. Love. Hope. Responsibility. The desire to make a decent life. That divide became part of the city's social structure, and its edicts have taught people to ignore or fear one another.

The story is about the "Rooted" and the "Highborn" and society's habit of splitting into factions... then forgetting how much people on both sides have in common.

Literary & Cinematic Influences

Moral Themes Without Preaching

C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien both influenced the way I think about moral and spiritual themes in fiction. Their stories carry ideas rooted in Christianity without stopping to explain the theology. The meaning comes through the choices characters make: sacrifice, mercy, courage, temptation, forgiveness, loyalty, humility, and the struggle between selfishness and service.

I wanted Halidom's themes to work the same way. People have a responsibility to be kind to one another. Goodness matters, and faith is worth keeping despite what life throws at you. I wove those themes into my characters, their actions, and their consequences.

Life Finds a Way

Michael Crichton was another major influence, especially his recurring warning that life resists control. His characters create powerful systems, convince themselves they understand every variable, and eventually discover that nature, technology, and human behavior are more complicated than the models they trusted. "Life finds a way" captured that idea perfectly.

Beneath the Cloudline is not arguing that science is inherently bad. The danger comes when hubris overtakes understanding and the experts become too certain they have the one solution.

Studio Ghibli

Miyazaki's movies, especially Spirited Away, shaped the way I approached the worldbuilding. His films feel much older than the characters moving through them. Ruins, machines, and landscapes seem to carry histories of their own. The story does not stop to explain every strange detail. You are allowed to sense that something larger exists beyond what the characters understand.

Machines feel ancient. Landscapes feel alive. Lost civilizations leave behind systems whose original purpose is only partly understood. The characters in Beneath the Cloudline are living inside a history much deeper than any of them realize.

The Three-Act Hero Arc

Growing up in the 1980s, the original Star Wars trilogy helped me understand character arcs, especially the journey from an ordinary life into a much larger conflict. Luke Skywalker begins with a narrow view of the world beyond Tatooine. He leaves home, discovers that the world is complicated, and eventually has to decide what kind of person he will become.

Jax follows a different path, but the underlying structure is familiar. He begins with a limited understanding of Halidom, crosses into an unfamiliar world, uncovers truths that were hidden from him, and takes on responsibilities he never expected. What matters most is how a young person changes when their world suddenly becomes larger and far less certain.