I’ve always been drawn to the vastness of space—the silent pull of the stars, the quiet wonder of what might lie beyond our thin slice of existence. As a kid, I was a devoted Trekkie, and even now I find myself continually returning to watch science fiction films, drawn by the same restless curiosity that first took hold decades ago.

 

So when I finally sat down to write a science fiction novel and began, as I always do, with pre-writing research, I assumed that understanding the various complexities of the universe would take the same amount of time as my other pre-writing research. I was wrong. Quantum mechanics, singularities, string theory, and the strange mathematics that try to describe reality itself weren’t ideas I could simply absorb, even with a science background. They resisted easy understanding. So instead of trying to take in the universe’s full complexity all at once, I learned them one piece at a time. That approach took years and delayed the finished manuscript considerably—especially since I was researching and writing other novels at the same time. Eventually, the science came into focus. From there, I chose the facts I found most striking and believable and wove them into the novel’s background—enough to give readers a real sense of the universe’s complexity without burying them in technical detail.

 

I wanted the story itself—which is always the point—to feel as singular as the cosmos it was set against. Hubble’s observations put the number of galaxies in the observable universe at roughly two trillion. Multiply that by even a conservative estimate of planets per galaxy, and you land on numbers with more zeros than a mind can hold—a septillion or more, by some estimates: a 1 followed by twenty-four zeros. Against odds like that, assuming we’re alone in the universe starts to look like the less reasonable position, not the more careful one.

 

That’s the assumption I built the book around. I was drawn to the idea of alien minds billions of years old—beings for whom an entire human lifetime passes like a single flicker—and to the idea that intelligent life wouldn’t need to look anything like us to qualify as intelligent or as life. Some could be biological, yet built on chemistries nothing like our carbon-and-DNA foundation. Others could be pure energy, silicon-based, crystalline, or something stranger than any of those categories. The possibilities felt endless, and I wanted my novel to capture that sense.

 

One of the ideas I found most compelling, once I understood it, was the strange elasticity of spacetime—that a single year spent in the right (or wrong) region of space could mean that centuries, even millennia, had passed back on Earth. That idea became one of the book’s emotional engines, not just a scientific curiosity.

 

After years of research and just as long spent weaving the science and the characters—human and otherwise—into a single story, I’m almost finished with Whispers from the Infinite, my next novel, which should be available for purchase at the end of this year.