"A cerebral page-turner of the highest order."
- Barnes & Noble on The God Particle
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In the Beginning (how to create an idea for your follow-up novel in 2 hours)
In 2002, after an eight-year search (I was rejected around seventy times over the course of two books) I finally landed an literary agent. As exciting as it was to achieve this first step, I soon realized that an even greater hurdle still stood between me and publication--an editor would have to enjoy my manuscript enough to make an offer on it.
One day, several weeks after the manuscript was sent out (and after I'd already received a handful of publisher rejections) my agent called with the exciting news that an editor was indeed interested. He told me to expect a call from this editor, who during the call might ask if I was willing to write another science-oriented thriller. Of course there was only one answer to a question like that.
Remarkably, though, I had no ideas for another science thriller. I was working then on a manuscript called The Boys of Summer, and it wasn't anything like my first book. But that didn't stop me from telling the editor I would be happy to write another science thriller. That evening I went home, hopped on the Internet, and within a couple of hours I had come up with the basic premise for my second novel, The God Particle.
Since my late teens I've been interested in the relationship between science and spirituality, particularly in the areas of thought where they overlap. No idea is more interesting or frustrating or elusive (to me, at least) as the origin of existence. Science has fashioned well-supported theories that take us all the way back to when the universe was just fractions of a second old, but beyond that things become much more uncertain. As a kid I had often wondered what came before the Big Bang, but later I learned that it didn't really make sense to ask such a question. Since spacetime itself is believed to have emerged from the Big Bang, there is no before.
So I'm sitting there, thinking about how weird the universe really is (yes, I know I'm a nerd), and I'm wondering why the world is so different than the way we perceive it. And since I've read a few books about cosmology and quantum physics written for laypeople like me, I know just enough to realize how little I know. And finally, I'm thinking how amazing it is that a person can sit in front of his computer and contemplate the universe in the first place. Because if you're not convinced by spiritual explanations for creation, if you're a Big Bang kind of guy, then you realize that life is pretty much an accident, and that sentient life is a miracle. As Mike says in Chapter Two,
"...when you think of the interaction of all those particles and energy, and gravity collapsing matter into stars, and some of those stars exploding, ejecting heavier elements that eventually end up as planets orbiting stars, including at least one that somehow produced an organism complex enough to ask questions of the universe that spawned it--hell, I don't know if 'miracle' is a big enough word to describe something like that."
The above statement, combined with Kelly's response below, was the central question I wanted to explore in my novel:
"...all that randomness, all those accidents.doesn't that seem a little--I don't know--coincidental to you?"
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