The idea for Operation Reboot began not with science fiction, but with family history. While exploring my ancestry, I discovered something unexpected. Like many Americans, I knew I had European forebears who arrived in the colonial era. What surprised me—delighted me, in fact—was evidence suggesting I might also have Mohawk ancestry.
The story was complicated. One ancestor, Abiathar Evans, was said to be the son of Samuel Evans and a Mohawk woman. That Samuel’s mother, Rebecca Kellog, had been abducted during the Deerfield raid of 1704 and raised among the Mohawks, while his father, John Evans, was half Abenaki and also raised in Mohawk country. John’s father, Jonathan Evans, had himself been taken in a raid and later formed a family with an Abenaki woman.
As I dug deeper, I learned that this Mohawk connection was probably not mine after all—Abiathar’s father was most likely another Samuel Evans, one without the Mohawk tie. Still, I was fascinated by the story of Rebecca Kellog, the Evans family, and the tangled relationships between Europeans and Native peoples in the early colonial period.
What I uncovered bore little resemblance to the simplified story I had been taught in grade school. “Colonization,” I came to realize, was just a polite word for invasion and conquest—driven by greed, expansion, and broken promises.
One book that deeply influenced me was Pekka Hämäläinen’s Indigenous Continent. It emphasized how conquest in North America unfolded differently than in Mexico or South America. The Spanish could topple the centralized Aztec and Inca empires by eliminating their leaders. North America, by contrast, was home to many smaller tribes, each independent, often competing with one another. This made conquest slower and more complicated—but eventually, it also made European domination inevitable.
The tribes themselves carried long histories of rivalry and warfare. The Wampanoag, for example, helped the Pilgrims in part because they hoped for allies against their enemies, the Narragansett. Among the Mohawk and others, “mourning wars” were a long-standing custom—raids to capture new members to replace those lost. The infamous raids on Deerfield, in which captives were taken and then raised as Mohawk, was rooted in this tradition. While such practices helped tribes survive demographic losses, they also fueled cycles of retaliation that hindered unity.
This history sparked a central question behind Operation Reboot: What if Native tribes had been able to set aside their rivalries and unite in the face of European invasion?
Even then, I doubt they could have fully resisted—the Europeans were simply too numerous and too technologically advanced. But it’s a powerful “what if.” In my story, Visitors arrive with knowledge to help level the playing field. Could things have unfolded differently? Could history have taken another path?
That question—the collision of real history, lost possibilities, and imagined futures—is what inspired me to write Operation Reboot.