Why I Write About Celebrity Conspiracies and Alternative Endings in The Utopia Series

There’s something uniquely human about the moment a conspiracy theory makes you pause. Not because you believe it, not because you’re suddenly ready to throw your life into a rabbit hole of wild ideas, but because for a single second you stop and ask yourself a simple question: What if?

I’ve never considered myself a conspiracy theorist. I don’t live my life assuming every major event is manipulated or that every tragedy hides a secret underbelly. But I have always been fascinated by the way conspiracy theories briefly shake the foundation of what we think we know. That tiny flicker in your mind where certainty bends, even for a heartbeat, is endlessly interesting to me.

From the moment we start school, we’re taught to trust the information given to us. If a teacher told a classroom of five-year-olds that grass was orange and that green and orange were opposites, those children would walk out into the world believing it. They wouldn’t question it. They’d simply assume the rest of the world had it wrong.

That’s the power of information.

And it’s also the danger of it.

We grow up trusting the “facts” presented to us. We trust the news. We trust official reports. We trust the explanations we’re handed after a celebrity dies or a tragedy unfolds. But are these facts always true? Why do some details disappear into top secret files for decades? Why does the world accept certain explanations without ever being shown the full picture?

This is where the idea for The Utopia Series began to take shape. I started wondering what the greatest misinformation of all time might look like. A deception so vast and so perfectly executed that every living person on Earth believed it. A global cover created by governments and powerful organisations. A lie that had rewritten history in plain sight.

One day I had a striking image in my mind. Elvis, Marilyn Monroe and JFK walking together along a quiet tropical beach. Not in hiding, not tormented, but simply alive. Peaceful. Free. And that moment opened the door. It made me imagine a world where the most iconic figures in history didn’t die as we were told, but were taken to a secret place to live out their days in luxury and anonymity.

But once I started writing through the eyes of these people, a new truth emerged. Not everyone would want that life. Some would ache for the families they left behind. Some would feel bound by duty, politics or morality. Some would simply crave freedom over comfort. And suddenly I realised this wasn’t just a peaceful paradise. It was a society with tensions, fractures and conflicting desires.

That was when Utopia stopped being an island and became a story.

One group fighting to protect the sanctity and secrecy of the world they’ve built.

The other desperate to return home, to expose the truth, to tell the world who they really are and what really happened.

Two opposing sides.

Forgotten legends on each of them.

A luxury paradise that slowly reveals itself to be a beautiful prison.

And then comes the question that ignites the imagination.

What if even one of these legends reappeared?

Picture it.

A new scientific breakthrough.

An AI-powered verification tool confirming with absolute certainty that Michael Jackson had faked his own death and was still alive. One undeniable piece of evidence. One impossible revelation made possible.

The world would never be the same.

Our trust in what we are told would fracture overnight.

Everything we thought we knew about truth, authority and history would be thrown into question.

And that is why I write these stories. Not to claim that conspiracies are real, but to explore the spaces between truth and belief. To challenge the idea that facts are fixed. To imagine the lives these icons might have lived if history had quietly bent itself around them.

The Utopia Series is all about that single, electric moment when certainty wavers and the world feels a little less solid than it did a second before. It’s about human nature, loyalty, morality and the power of hidden truths.

And above all, it’s about asking the question that conspiracy theories spark so beautifully.

What if it wasn’t the way we were told?