The idea behind Kanana: The Jungle Girl was another homage to Edgar Rice Burroughs, in this case his books like Tarzan and Pellucidar.

I had just read a Harry Turtledove book called,A World of Difference.  In it, the author simply replaces Mars in our solar system with Minerva, an earth-like world.  I used this same idea to place our world’s continents into one section of a ring world.  Then I set it in 1913, which let me put Teddy Roosevelt in the story.

There were a lot of starts and stops before I finally finished this book, but eventually I did.