Month: July 2017

Good science fiction needs good science as well as good fiction.

In my first novel, When Comes Such Another, the reality distortion comes from the presence of Whu, a creature from a parallel universe. Within close proximity of him, the normal gravitational rules of our world don’t apply. Stuff tilts, like the house in the illustration on the book’s cover. These gravitational perturbations are proportional to the level of discord, the lack of harmony, among those near him. The perturbations reveal the discord between the characters, often in amusing ways.

Is this really possible? Science fiction requires some suspension of belief by the reader, but the portrayal of an alternate reality must be, to some extent, plausible. Could this actually happen? In those tales set in the future, the implicit assumption is that science has advanced far enough to enable intergalactic time travel and encounters with alien life.

For stories set in the present day, the futuristic science might come from other universes (for example in the movie E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial) or from new discoveries here on earth (e.g. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein). In both cases of present day settings, the plausibility requirement is especially high. So, in writing my novel, I felt obligated to supply some scientific justification to support the suspension of belief.

That scientific justification is described in the Physics section of the book’s website. Using ordinary English, I explain what is happening. Then I postulate (for those with a mathematical background) some equations that extend today’s understanding of gravity. In my physics-based formulation, space-time becomes crenellated, and when the manifold warps, it becomes possible to jump from one point to another in time. That’s how Whu travels from one universe to another.

Hey, I spent a lot of my life as a theoretical physicist, and this theory leads to some fun scenes in the book. There’s a chapter on the book’s website where the heroine deals with the gravitational changes. Have a read and tell me what you think.

The writing of my first novel actually began twenty-five years before I even thought of doing it. I was carrying my lunch tray, walking out of the cafeteria in the Student Union at the University of Wisconsin, onto the plaza overlooking the lake. Somewhere among that throng of students and faculty was a table full of my friends, but I couldn’t see them. Neither could I hear them, though they saw me and were calling my name.

One of that coterie of physicists and artists who hung out together was Ugo Camerini, an experimental physicist who fled fascist Italy just before World War II. Ugo was a fine scientist with a sharp mind and a sharper wit.  Ugo grew frustrated with my inability to hear their cries of “Mark, Mark”, so he tried a different approach, a European approach.

“Herr Doctor Professor, over here,” he called out.

To my forever regret, that was the moment I heard their cries and turned around. From then on, I was always known in Madison as Herr Doctor Professor.

Skip forward those twenty-five years to a single-digits cold winter night at a farmhouse outside of Fargo, North Dakota. I was visiting my friend Doug Burgum, then a software entrepreneur and now the Governor of North Dakota. Doug asked me to help him put his three young children to bed by telling his daughter Jesse a bedtime story.

I sat on the edge of her bed and invented a tale of creature from a parallel universe that suddenly appeared in the laboratory of a physicist called Herr Doctor Professor by his students and friends. Thus was born the story that became my first novel, When Comes Such Another.

With the kids asleep, Doug and I talked well past midnight, sitting outdoors in the tree house he was building for his children, and I almost forgot the bedtime story. But flying home to New Hampshire the next day, the story came back to me and I started the book that launched my new career as a writer.