The Last Hunter: Collected Edition (Antarktos Saga #1-5)

Question from Cherei McCarter: Did the scientific group that drilled through to the deep lake mess with your stories at all?

Because The Antarktos Saga is largely fantasy, there was never really a chance that anything they discovered in Antarctica could hurt the story (though they could confirm parts of it!). They’re just lucky the crustal displacement didn’t happen while they were drilling through the ice. The one story of mine it does mess with a bit, is Beneath, which starts out at Lake Vostok, in Antarctica. The characters are preparing to melt through the ice in search of extremophile microbes. So, really, I predicted the future accurately (Beneath was first written in 1995). I just got the date wrong.



Question from Jenn Turkette: There are a few characters in Antarktos Rising, like Kat Farrell, that also appear in The Last Hunter books, so when you wrote Antarktos Rising, did you already have the plot ideas for the other books already in your mind?

Nope! Other than (spoiler alert for those who have not yet read Antarktos Rising) Kat surviving the end of the book, I had no specific idea about what the future held for her. I wrote her apparent demise vaguely on purpose, because I knew I wanted to someday write a sequel, but I had no idea it would turn out to be a five book epic in which she would become a major character. This is true for Wright, Aimee, Merrill and Mirabelle.



Question from Kyle Mohr: Out of all the Origins Edition stories, what made you choose Antarktos Rising to expand?

For those who don’t know, the Origins Edition stories are what I, and many fans, call my first five novels. They are, in chronological order, The Didymus Contingency, Raising the Past, Beneath, Antarktos Rising and Kronos. All five of them were self-published, and they effectively launched my career. They are my literary origins.

As for the question, I think it’s because the world created for Antarktos Rising was so vast and unexplored by the end of the book, that I never stopped thinking about what else could be there. I was, and still am, tempted to write sequels for the other Origins books, but none of them would become the five-book epic story that is The Antarktos Saga. There just isn’t a big enough world to explore, whereas, with Antarktos, the potential for stories are essentially limitless.



Question from Cherei McCarter: Do you believe Nephilim ever existed? And if so, why haven’t we found REAL proof of their existence?

In fact, I do. Beyond the fact that I trust the Bible as an accurate historical document, there is a lot of historical evidence for giants outside of the Bible—in the Book of Enoch and in the recorded history of most cultures around the world. If you consider the detailed descriptions of the Nephilim in the Bible and the Book of Enoch, and apply it to other myths, they fall into place. Now, I can’t say for certain whether Hercules was an actual living man, and that he was a Nephilim. I’m just saying it fits. And I believe, whatever they looked like (or still look like), the Nephilim are real. Do they look like the creatures I’ve conjured for The Antarktos Saga? Very unlikely. I kind of went nuts, with the exception of Thinkers and Seekers, the Nephilim races I based on two of the most commonly reported creatures associated with the modern “alien” abduction phenomenon. So, yeah, I’m a weirdo.



Question from Mike Pastore: Is a cataclysmic event of the magnitude that started Antarktos Rising an actual possibility or just scientific data manipulated for the storyline?

Absolutely! At some point in Earth’s future—possibly the near future—it’s almost a guarantee that an asteroid will strike. Or that the mega volcano beneath Yellowstone will erupt. Or any number of other horrible events that have happened in the past and are likely to happen again. As for the specific event featured in Antarktos Rising—crustal displacement—it’s one of the more unlikely scenarios, but it’s possible. Crustal displacement, also known as Polar Shift, is when the entire Earth’s crust, which rests upon a thick layer of molten lava, slips free and rotates. It could slip just a few feet (which would still be enough to cause worldwide havoc) or shift North Dakota to the North Pole and Antarctica to the equator. There is evidence that this has happened in the past, though some argue that it happened gradually, over long periods of time, rather than in a single day. So the severity and suddenness of the event in Antarktos Rising is me taking things to the extreme, but some do believe it’s possible.