The Cost of Remembering: Author Alicia Rice Haynes Talks Dystopia, Memory, and Moral Courage
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Alicia Rice Haynes is a multi-genre author, leadership development strategist, and speaker whose work explores power, resilience, and the human condition. In her dystopian novel Historian of the Wasteland: Beyond the Veil of Decay, she introduces readers to Elara, a determined historian navigating a post-apocalyptic world where knowledge has become both humanity’s greatest weapon and its most dangerous secret.
Influenced by her lifelong love of storytelling and the encouragement of her grandmother, Haynes crafts narratives that challenge readers to reflect on history, moral responsibility, and what it truly means to rebuild after collapse. In this interview, she shares insights into her writing journey, the themes behind her powerful dystopian world, and why remembering the past may be humanity’s greatest hope for the future.
Your protagonist Elara is a historian rather than a warrior. What inspired you to center the story around someone whose power comes from knowledge instead of physical strength?
Elara and the entire series actually came to me in a dream, which is still one of the most fascinating parts of the story’s origin. In that dream, she wasn’t carrying a weapon or fighting the way you typically see characters do in zombie stories. Instead, her strength came from knowledge. She believed the past held answers that could help people understand the present and move forward into the future.
That idea grabbed my attention right away. In most zombie movies, or even in my favorite zombie game series, Resident Evil, survival is all about weapons and brute force. Elara faces the apocalypse in a completely different way. Her main strengths are curiosity, compassion, and a drive to understand what happened to the world instead of just fighting what’s left.
When I woke up from that dream, I wondered if I should write the story. My husband encouraged me to go for it, and I’m glad he did. Elara turned into a real example of the saying “knowledge is power.” Through her story, I wanted to show how learning about our past can be a powerful way to shape our future.
A major theme in Historian of the Wasteland is the idea that knowledge can be both powerful and dangerous. What message did you hope readers would take away from that tension?
One of the ideas I wanted to explore in Historian of the Wasteland is that knowledge isn’t just power—it’s responsibility. In a broken world, information can shape who holds influence, who survives, and even how people understand reality itself. That makes knowledge incredibly powerful, but also dangerous.
In the wasteland, different factions understand this in very different ways. Some want to control knowledge because it gives them authority. Others fear it because the truth can challenge the systems they’ve built. Elara represents a different perspective. She believes knowledge should be preserved and shared, even when it’s uncomfortable or painful, because understanding the past is the only way humanity can learn from its mistakes.
The tension comes from the fact that truth can disrupt stability. Sometimes, the things we discover about history force us to confront difficult realities about ourselves and the choices people have made. I hope readers walk away thinking about how knowledge shapes our world today—how it can be used to control people, but also to empower us to create something better.
The book asks whether truth and memory can still save humanity in a broken world. Why do you think remembering the past is so important—even when it’s painful?
History holds the lessons of both our greatest failures and our greatest triumphs when societies choose to ignore painful truths, those same patterns tend to reappear in new forms.
In Historian of the Wasteland, the world’s collapse has left many people focused solely on survival. But Elara believes survival alone isn’t enough. If humanity wants to rebuild something better, it has to understand what led to its downfall in the first place. That requires confronting the past honestly—even the parts that are uncomfortable or painful.
Memory is also deeply connected to identity. Our history shapes who we are, how we see the world, and how we treat one another. Without that connection, people risk losing not only their history but also their humanity.
Through Elara’s journey, I wanted to explore the idea that remembering isn’t about living in the past. It’s about learning from it so we can move forward with greater wisdom and compassion.
Your dystopian world includes rival factions and evolving undead threats. How did you approach building a world that feels both terrifying and believable?
When I started creating the world of Historian of the Wasteland, I aimed to make it both unsettling and believable. In many dystopian stories, the outside threat, like zombies, disease, or environmental collapse, is only part of the danger. The rest comes from how people react to the crisis.
Interestingly, when I first saw the factions in my dream, they all felt strangely familiar and symbolic. Each group represented a different way humanity might react when the world falls apart. One faction believes survival requires destroying anything that isn’t like them. Another believes the only way forward is through assimilation—absorbing others to evolve. Another seeks enlightenment through worship and devotion. And the main antagonist believes they have transcended humanity entirely and are destined to become gods.
Those conflicting beliefs create tension and shape the moral landscape of the wasteland. The undead threats are terrifying, but the deeper conflict comes from how survivors interpret the collapse of the old world and what they believe the future should look like.
For me, the most unsettling dystopian worlds are the ones that feel possible. The wasteland in this story isn’t just dangerous because of the creatures that inhabit it—it’s dangerous because humanity is still trying to decide what it wants to become.
Elara’s journey is driven by questions about how the world fell. As you wrote the story, did discovering those answers change how you saw the characters or the world yourself?
Absolutely. One of the most fascinating parts of writing Historian of the Wasteland was realizing that I was discovering the world alongside Elara. Her journey is driven by curiosity and a desire to understand what really happened, and in many ways, I experienced the same sense of discovery as I wrote.
As pieces of the story began to fall into place, it changed how I viewed certain characters and factions. Motivations that initially seemed simple became more complex once I understood the fears, beliefs, and survival strategies that shaped them. In a broken world, very few choices are purely good or purely evil—most are driven by desperation, ideology, or the belief that a certain path is necessary for survival.
That process deepened the story for me. Instead of seeing the wasteland as just a setting filled with danger, I began to see it as a reflection of human nature under extreme pressure. The answers Elara uncovers aren’t always comforting, but they help reveal how fragile—and how resilient—humanity can be when everything familiar has been stripped away.
You work in leadership development by day and write complex fiction by night. How does your work with leaders influence the characters, conflicts, or moral choices in your stories?
Working in leadership development has definitely influenced the way I approach characters and conflict in my stories. A large part of my professional work involves understanding how people make decisions, especially in high-pressure environments where there isn’t always a clear right or wrong answer. That same complexity shows up in the world of Historian of the Wasteland.
In leadership, you quickly learn that decisions are rarely simple. Leaders often have to balance competing priorities, incomplete information, and the needs of many different people. The same is true for the characters in the wasteland. Every choice they make has consequences, and sometimes the decision that protects one group may put another at risk.
Because of my work, I’m fascinated by the motivations behind people’s choices. What someone believes about power, responsibility, and survival often shapes how they lead—or how they attempt to control others. That perspective helped me create characters who aren’t just reacting to danger, but wrestling with difficult moral questions about what kind of world should emerge after everything has fallen apart.
Many authors say their characters eventually “take over” the story. Did that happen with Elara or any other characters while writing this book?
In many ways, Elara didn’t take over the story—because she is the story. From the very beginning, the narrative centered on her journey, her curiosity, and her determination to understand what had happened to the world. Everything in the wasteland is filtered through her perspective as a historian who believes the past still holds meaning.
Where I did have to be careful, however, was with the antagonist. The concept behind them is incredibly fascinating, and their philosophy about evolution and transcendence is powerful enough to dominate the narrative if I weren’t mindful easily. There were moments during the writing process when I had to step back to ensure the story remained centered on Elara’s journey rather than allowing the antagonist’s ideas to overshadow it.
I wanted readers to feel the weight and intrigue of that opposing worldview without losing sight of the heart of the story. Ultimately, the tension between Elara’s belief in knowledge, memory, and humanity and the antagonist’s vision for the future drives the book’s deeper conflict.
Your work explores generational trauma, moral conflict, and resilience. What draws you to these deeper human themes in a dystopian setting?
What draws me to those deeper human themes is the idea that dystopian settings strip away many of the comforts and systems people rely on in everyday life. When the world collapses, characters are forced to confront who they truly are and what they truly believe. In that kind of environment, questions about morality, trauma, and resilience become impossible to ignore.
Generational trauma is especially interesting to me because the past doesn’t simply disappear when the world ends. The beliefs, fears, and choices of previous generations still shape how people respond to crisis. In many ways, when generational trauma occurs, one of two things tends to happen: a person either conforms to the trauma and continues the cycle, or they actively choose to confront it and work to overcome it.
That idea is personal to me because I’ve experienced firsthand what it means to work through generational trauma actively. It can be daunting and difficult, but it’s also incredibly worthwhile. That perspective naturally finds its way into my writing. In Historian of the Wasteland, the collapse of civilization didn’t erase humanity’s past—it magnified it. At the same time, the story also explores resilience and the possibility that even in a broken world, people can choose a different path forward.
You’ve mentioned your grandmother played an important role in encouraging your storytelling. How has that early encouragement shaped your confidence and voice as an author today?
My grandmother played a very important role in shaping my confidence as a storyteller. When I was young, she recognized my love for stories and encouraged me to explore that creativity rather than dismissing it as just imagination. She made storytelling feel meaningful. It wasn’t just something I enjoyed doing—it was something worth nurturing.
Before she passed away in 2023, she asked me to start writing and publishing again. For a few years, I had stepped away from publishing because a previous manager told me I needed to focus on my career and that writing was “just a hobby.” Hearing that made me question whether I should continue sharing my stories publicly.
My grandmother reminded me that stories matter and that the creative parts of who we are shouldn’t be silenced. I promised her that I would not let my stories be quieted. After she passed, that promise stayed with me. It reminded me that life is short and that stories deserve their moment to be shared with the world.
In many ways, every book I write now carries a piece of that promise with it.
Since Historian of the Wasteland is the first book in a series, what can readers look forward to as the universe expands—and what larger questions do you hope the series will explore?
As the Historian of the Wasteland series expands, readers will begin to see that the world is much larger and more complex than it initially appears. The first book introduces the wasteland and some of the factions that inhabit it, but it only scratches the surface of the forces shaping this new world.
Future installments will explore the deeper origins of the collapse, the evolution of the threats that now inhabit the wasteland, and the philosophies driving the different factions. Each group believes it has discovered the “correct” path forward for humanity, which creates a powerful clash of ideas about survival, identity, and what it truly means to evolve.
At the center of it all is Elara’s search for truth. As she uncovers more about the past, the questions become even bigger: Was the collapse inevitable? Can humanity learn from its history, or is it destined to repeat the same mistakes in a different form?
The series asks a larger question: if civilization has a chance to rebuild, what kind of world should humanity choose to create?
For aspiring writers or storytellers who feel their voice doesn’t matter, what would you tell them based on your own journey as an author?
I would tell them that their voice absolutely matters, even if the world around them doesn’t always recognize it right away. Every story carries a perspective, an experience, or an idea that someone else may need to hear. The challenge is that creative voices are often questioned or dismissed—sometimes by others and sometimes by our own doubts.
If you feel called to tell stories, that calling is worth honoring. Not every story will reach millions of people, but it may reach the one person who needed to read it at exactly the right moment. That’s the quiet power of storytelling.
My advice is simple: keep writing, keep sharing your voice, and don’t allow anyone else to decide whether your stories deserve to exist.
If the world truly collapsed tomorrow, what piece of knowledge or truth would you fight the hardest to preserve—and why?
If the world collapsed tomorrow, the truth I would fight the hardest to preserve is that our past, present, and future are deeply connected. The past helped create who we are, the present is a gift, and the choices we make today shape the legacy we leave behind.
History reminds us that humanity is capable of both great harm and great compassion. That knowledge matters because it gives us the ability to choose differently. No matter what circumstances we face, our actions today define the story that will be told about us tomorrow.
I believe it’s important to live in a way that honors that truth. If someone were to one day pick up the story of our lives, whether literally or figuratively, it should reflect choices we can be proud of. Choices rooted in integrity, compassion, and a willingness to grow.
In many ways, that idea is also at the heart of Historian of the Wasteland. Elara believes that knowledge and memory matter because they remind us where we came from and help guide the path forward. Even in the most broken world, understanding our past and honoring the present can shape a future worth fighting for.
