Dark Matter | JJK

Farewell

Most wonderful reader,

Before we bid farewell to both this book and each other, there are a few things I wish to share with you. This entire journey has been most precious to me not just as a writer, but also as a little girl just easing into the unfamiliar familiarity of this world and the way it works. I don't think I'd be able to properly say goodbye to this world before penning down a few last things.

INSPIRATION

It's difficult to pinpoint that one precise moment in life when the fog of clustered abstractions that is the human mind clears and an idea is born. It was sometime around the beginning of 2019 when I finished reading The Maze Runner series, that it occurred to me that dystopia was a genre I wanted to explore in the writing field too. I have a stack-full of drafts sitting both in a years-old notebook and my laptop about long-forgotten plot lines, and I'd never started a somewhat long-term project like this before. Maybe it was the intrigue of the book series or the fact that I wanted to try publishing on this platform for the longest time, or a particular quote I read ("If there's a story that you want to read that hasn't been written yet, you must write it yourself"), that gave me the courage I needed to publish this book.

Another source I really drew inspiration from was Hold Back the River by James Bay. The song was released sometime in 2014 but I only heard it a few years ago, and it touched something inside me. Just the nostalgia of wanting to stop the inevitable from happening, the guilt of not being there, the hope for a little more time – these are all feelings I experienced when first listening to it and themes I later incorporated in the storyline. Safe to call it Dark Matter's theme song, hehe.

Apart from The Maze Runner series, what motivated me to go for sci-fi was the set of subjects I study at school. My country's education system asks us to choose between three streams of subjects – Science, Commerce and Humanities. For the longest time it had been my plan to choose the third option, but doing so in grade eleven made me feel like I was...betraying...science? If that makes sense? Like, I never had it in mind to choose commerce, but science was something I scored fairly high marks in and all my teachers/friends were a 100% sure I'd choose it. I like science and math (but absolutely, completely, utterly DESPISE chemistry. Shocking, I know) but humanities is something else (Liberal Arts for life duh). So a part of me wanted to stay connected to science in a way, I think, and hence the science-fuelled plotline for my first ever book.

Dark Matter, to an extent, can also be called a frame story. A frame story is one with multiple stories within the story, as can be seen by the tales Petra narrates to the kids at the library and occasionally, to a sleepy Jungkook. This was inspired by a tradition between me and my father, in which he would narrate bedtime stories to me every night till I was around 10-12. These short stories have become a major part of who I am, and it was only right for me to include them here too. These stories were also added to allude towards the fact that these protagonists are, in the simplest sense, children in an adult world that's grappling to steal their innocence. Also note, Jungkook is referred to as a "boy" (not a "man") throughout the book save for the epilogue, and purpose of this was to drive home that very fact.

I think you're all waiting for me to bring this up, because while this book was half way done, a whole freakin' pandemic decided to shove its ugly face into our lives. It scared me too, when some of the things I'd written in here so starkly resembled the circumstances we're in right now. The devastation is immeasurable and irreversible, and I know we're all waiting for this to be over. But this time within the confines of my home did give me an opportunity to introspect as well as look at the people around me, at all the heroes who lose sleep just so me and my family can live in safety, and it gave me all the more reasons to say thank you and continue this book. Our characters did make it through everything they faced, and we will, too. I truly, truly believe that.