This is the last in a series of blogs offering a behind-the-scenes look at Rick’s first novel, Radiance. This blog contains spoilers.
 
I thought I’d end this series on Radiance with a few random memories and reflections.
 
Tristan West is not me. I made West a public relations practitioner, which is what I do for a living. But he’s not intended to be me, or at least I hope not. West sacrifices his ethics for a cushy job, then lives a bitter existence when he’s blamed for some bad press and fired. For much of Radiance, he’s rude, snarky and resentful. I can be any of those things at a given time, I suppose. But I hope I’m not Tristan West as a matter of course. If I am, someone please tell me!
 
T.J. is the only character based on a real person. T.J. Klein is modeled on my daughter, Tobi. Fiery and determined, she’s also tenderhearted and fully invested in her faith. T.J. was the easiest character for me to write because she’s so much like Tobi. The other characters may borrow personality traits from people I know or have encountered in one way or another—yes, Payat and Eucleia are inspired a little bit by Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation—but T.J. is definitely my daughter.
 
The Cathedral owes its existence to a 1980 prog album. One of my favorite records is The Turn of a Friendly Card by The Alan Parsons Project. It’s a concept album about gambling and gambling addiction. There’s even a line in the title tune, “But a pilgrim must follow in search of a shrine/As he enters inside the cathedral.” The Cathedral also showed up in my original short story, “For The Sake of Ten,” that eventually inspired Radiance.
 
The visit to Antok was originally much longer. Before I slashed several thousand words from the manuscript, I felt that if I was going to take the story to another galaxy, I ought to spend some time there. One of my editors balked at this, feeling that the tale took a hard left turn that wasn’t necessary. It took me a few years to realize he was correct.
 
My mother, who hated science fiction, couldn’t stop reading. A voracious reader, Mom nevertheless didn’t understand my interest in SF and didn’t dabble in it. When I gave her a copy of Radiance, she politely congratulated me and, perhaps feeling parental obligation, settled down to read it. A few days later she said to me, “I couldn’t put it down!” She stayed up all night to read it cover to cover and loved it. Now, Mom was a horrible liar, and she knew it, so she invariably spoke the truth. If she said she read it straight through and loved it, you can believe she did. It remains one of the best compliments I ever got for Radiance.
 
There won’t be a sequel. Probably. A lot of print science fiction these days comes in threes. I’m not sure where or when this started, but I blame Star Wars for the trilogy becoming all but required. My experience has been that trilogies that start strong often don’t end that way, and the middle book winds up being useless fluff. That’s not to say all series, be they in threes or more, are a bad thing. But I prefer nice, contained adventures. Radiance was always intended to be one book. That said, I’ve been asked now and then about doing a sequel. I’m not inclined so, but I do have an idea … so who knows?

This is the fourth in a series of blogs offering a behind-the-scenes look at Rick’s first novel, Radiance. This blog contains spoilers.
 
A common theme in many of my stories is how the main character causes his or her own undoing, whether through greed, pride or another of the so-called Seven Deadly Sins. (Fun fact: Though all seven are discouraged in various places in the Bible, they don’t appear under a single list anywhere in Scripture.) In Radiance, I suggest the future implosion of the Christian church results from its own neglect.
 
If you’re a regular visitor to this blog, you know I’m a confessing Christian. What the faith is supposed to stand for is near and dear to my heart. So it would be the easiest thing in the world to write a book in which the virtuous church of the future is threatened by, and is victorious over, an evil outside force. That is indeed part of what happens in Radiance. But even in the earliest drafts of the manuscript—in fact, as far back as the short stories that inspired it—I wanted to call out where I believed the Christian church was falling short and how that might play out over time.
 
It worries me that the church is shifting away from servanthood and embracing the pursuit of power, especially political power. That’s been painfully evident in the politics of the last few decades, and especially in the last several years. Much of Christianity has turned its back on loving God and loving our neighbors, or carrying for the poor and hungry and homeless and imprisoned, and taken on an angry mantle of condemnation—all while playing the martyr, decrying the “loss” of this right or that privilege or a fading tradition.
 
And so people reject the Gospel—not because they don’t recognize the love of God, but because so many believers refuse to show it to them.
 
Radiance takes this troubling trend and looks at what it does to the church decades from now. In the book, Christians have given up trying to influence the world. Instead, they turn their backs on it—the polar opposite of what Jesus did. And it nearly costs them everything.
 
In the end, the Christians in Radiance face their failures, repent and begin a new chapter. But it’s a near thing, a very near thing. I’m hoping and praying that the real church, the one of the 2020s, will face its shortcomings far sooner.