I wanted Angel of Mortality to occur within the realm of current high-tech advances, including nanotechnology, robotics, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and other such cutting-edge understandings. Although there are other fields that are also progressing, such as fusion energy and virtual reality, I have largely ignored them. Twenty years in the future seemed reasonable to allow for a breakthrough that combines these efforts.
During the Orange Revolution in 2004, I became interested in Ukraine. It was clearly a keystone between Europe to the west, Russia to the east, and Turkey to the south. Raisa grows up in the middle of the war between Ukraine and Russia in Avdiivka, in the Donbas region. She is now twelve years old, so it is 2029 before she leaves home to continue her studies in Kyiv. Kyrgyzstan is a natural path in her field of biochemistry from Kyiv to Moscow, to Almaty, Kazakhstan, and ultimately to Bishkek.
The novel is set in Bishkek, which, like Kyrgyzstan, is a place where the twelfth and twenty-first centuries intersect. Although Kyrgyzstan is part of the Commonwealth of Independent States, which consists largely of countries once part of the Soviet Union and now under Russian influence, it has still managed to maintain its independence and get rid of the corruption that was common under Russian rule. Since Kyrgyzstan borders Kazakhstan, China, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, it is ideally positioned as a geographical and economic hub between Asia, Russia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe. All of this is central to Raisa’s deployment of the xenoborg EVE.