There are dreams too profound to let go of, because in the moment you’re having them, you know you’re seeing something true — not just for you, but a history. Sometimes it runs so deep you understand you’re seeing a history we all share, across cultures, in every corner of the world: the story of a great wave, coming.
I don’t know exactly when the dream first came to me. I was in my hometown, a little backwater I grew up in, walking to the post office to pick up a package, and instead of going in, I kept walking past it — because something felt strange. And then I stepped out of my world and into another. I was standing on the high parapet of an ancient fortress over the sea. I watched strange patterns dancing in the waves. And then I saw it: a wave coming, impossibly massive, and I knew it was going to hit. Then I woke up.
That dream stayed with me for my entire life. Years later I learned it’s a common one — that many people carry some version of it, the way many cultures carry stories of Atlantis, or of other lost civilizations swallowed by the sea. Those myths are rooted in something real: waves like this have destroyed and buried human settlements, in every part of the world where the coast is a fabric that usually yields and holds, but sometimes the water is too strong, and breaks through every defense, natural or built.
A vision like that can become many different stories. In mine, standing on that parapet, I knew I wasn’t in this world, but another — one that revealed itself to me slowly over the years, until the only thing left to do was write it down. It grew into a place, a time, a whole other world, distantly related to ours. I needed to tell it because I felt like at the bottom of the dream was a truth. Not one I could prove, or see, or travel to — but one worth telling anyway, because I think all of us, somewhere down deep, have had this dream: the nightmare of being washed away.
This week I’ve been watching the flooding at the Nepal–China border — a wall of water and debris coming down a valley with no warning, near the holy mountain of Kailash, where people on pilgrimage were killed. I’ve been on that highway. I’ve stood in that valley. I think about it often, and this week the dream came back into the world, not as a story this time, but as a fact.
It made me wonder: what if there’s a warning deeper than instruments, deeper than what science alone can give us? What if there’s a kind of warning that comes through observation — a way of seeing that changes behavior before the disaster arrives? Moving to higher ground. Raising the shields. What if some of us are built to see it coming? If only someone could have heard the rock, the failing of that mountain, if only…
That question is really where The Radore lives. It’s a story about doors that should never be opened, crossed, or entered — and about how, because we’re human, we can’t resist them anyway. It’s about an innocent world, populated by people who arrive already agreed on what they’re owed, ignoring the history, the people, and the world already there, seeing only what can be taken. We do this to our own world. It would be no surprise if we did it to another.
This book has lived in me — a whole history, a future, a past, a present. I know the dream isn’t unique to me. I know others have felt it, have seen it too. So this is an invitation, in a way: come to a world where, if you enter, you might find your own kind waiting. It starts with a single vision. An image. Something that stops you — in your sleep, in your tracks, in your life — as if you’d already lived through the end of the world once, and come back to tell what you saw.
And now, with what’s happened in Nepal, it doesn’t feel like just a disaster to me. It feels like a warning — for all of us, about what happens when we keep taking from the world that sustains us. We can’t destroy what made us and still expect to survive it.
So the real question underneath all of it: do any of us have the ability to see it coming, or to stop it? Most of us are just survivors, holding onto a tree in the flood, hoping it doesn’t give way. But I have to believe that somewhere, some of us can see further than that. I wrote this book hoping there are. Because the story lives on, and when the story becomes real, perhaps we can survive it because we already know it. It has happened before. It will happen again.