How the idea of Kailum came to me...
Kailum Boone was born slowly, over several years of reading science fiction, fantasy, survival stories, and pop physics books. Looking back, it makes sense that Kailum’s world became a mythic science-fantasy story about survival, belonging, courage, and the quiet fear that maybe we were meant for more than the lives we inherited.
Long before there was a plot, the world of Zorhros came to me in fragments. A dying red star. Endless dust storms swallowing the horizon for days at a time. Ancient caverns buried beneath the planet’s surface, whispering with impossible echoes from something older than memory itself.
At first, I found myself wondering whether people could even survive in a place like Zorhros.
What kind of lives would they build on a harsh desert world at the edge of everything? What jobs would exist there? What would families need? What would friendship look like in a place where survival mattered every single day?
And then, strangely enough, the answer came all at once. People adapt.
Even in worlds of extremes, people still find ways to live full lives. They work. They create. They argue. They dream. They fall in love. They raise families. They build communities. They find humor, purpose, danger, beauty, and sometimes even joy in places that should have broken them.
That realization changed the way I built Kailum’s world.
Zorhros could not just be a planet of dust, heat, machines, and ancient secrets. It had to be a place where people actually lived. A place with ordinary routines, difficult jobs, old technologies, crowded markets, worn-out engines, family expectations, teenage escapes, and friendships strong enough to survive the dust.
So I began creating.
Not just the big things — the planets, the machines, the ancient mysteries — but the ordinary things too. The small, everyday details that make a world feel real.
If Zorhros was a technologically advanced world, then people still had to live there. They had to work. They had to repair things, build things, salvage things, trade things, and survive in an environment that was never going to make life easy.
So I started asking questions.
What kinds of jobs would exist on a harsh desert planet? What technologies would people depend on? What fuels powered their ships? What machines kept their cities alive?
That led me to imagine the engines, salvage systems, fusion tech, Helium-3 fuel sources, and forgotten machines that shape daily life on Zorhros. Ideas like fusion and Helium-3 may feel futuristic to us now, but in Kailum’s time, some of that technology already belongs to an older age — the age of fossil ships, wrecked engines, abandoned systems, and forgotten tech waiting to be stripped, repaired, or rediscovered.
And then came the question every YA worldbuilder eventually has to answer:
What do the kids do?
In creating Zorhros, I wanted the universe to feel ancient, beautiful, and just slightly haunted, as though the stars themselves carried forgotten stories. But I also wanted it to feel deeply human. A place where kids grow up too fast. Where friendships become lifelines. Where first love, heartbreak, fear, courage, loneliness, and belonging can exist within moments of each other — the strange emotional gravity of being a teenager standing on the edge of adulthood.
More than anything, I wanted to write about young people who feel overlooked by the world around them, only to discover they were never ordinary at all.
Because even on a desert planet, young people need escape. They need speed, danger, competition, and places where they can test themselves against the world around them. That was when the idea of skiv racing arrived — teenagers racing across the dunes on hovering boards, cutting through dust and heat while something enormous moved beneath the sands below them.
The books, writers, and ideas that helped shape Kailum Boone are part of that journey too. Some inspired the survival elements. Others opened doors into cosmic mystery, hidden dimensions, ancient forces, and the possibility that the universe is far stranger than we imagine.
Thank you for stepping into this world so early.
The journey is only beginning. Follow the signal.
— R. L. Mesler