Parallel Lives in Different Worlds

Speaking of living one's life over again, have I mentioned Jo Walton's novel MY REAL CHILDREN before? Having reread it last week, I'm impressed anew by its unusual approach to alternate history, possibly unique. At least, I don't remember encountering anything else like it. The British protagonist's personal timeline splits into two at the end of her Oxford education, and the story follows both of her lives in two separate worlds from that point in early adulthood to her old age.

The prologue introduces the elderly Patricia in a nursing home. As the nurses often note on her chart, she's Very Confused. She remembers her life as Tricia, in which she accepted Mark's proposal at the crucial point of divergence, but also her life as Pat, in which she refused him. Did she have four children plus multiple miscarriages and stillbirths, in an emotionallly abusive marriage from which she escaped in middle age, or three children in a fulfilled, mostly happy life with love, travel, and success as a writer? After the prologue, chapters alternate episodes from the timelines of Tricia and Pat, each helpfully labeled with the years covered in that chapter.

Interestingly, neither of her worlds corresponds to the history we know. Therefore, the reader can feel no temptation to prefer either timeline as "real." Both alternate Earths are more scientifically and technologically advanced than ours, having colonies on the Moon by the 1990s, at the end of Patricia's life. In one history, there's a multi-national research station; in the other, two mutually hostile lunar military bases confront each other. In the latter world, President Kennedy died from an assassin's bomb; in the former, he served out his term and declined to run for reelection in 1964. In one history, international chaos, local wars with a constant threat of nuclear holocaust, and repressive political systems even in advanced Western nations plague the world. The other timeline, although of course not perfect, enjoys prosperity, widespread freedom, international cooperation, and relative peace.

In the novel's most intriguing twist, Pat leads her fulfilling life in the dystopian world, while Tricia suffers through her miserable marriage in the much better world. Suppose she could relive the decisive conversation with Mark and make one timeline definitively real. Which would she pick? Ordinarily, I snarl in frustration at novels that leave the reader hanging at the end. This book's "Lady or the Tiger?" conclusion, however, strikes me as perfect. What alternative does Patricia choose? What SHOULD she choose? Leaving that question open makes the ideal culmination for this thought-provoking narrative.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Living in Alternate Realities?

In Philip Wylie's 1951 novel THE DISAPPEARANCE, an unexplained phenomenon divides Earth into two separate, parallel versions. In one reality, all human males instantaneously vanish; in the other, all women and girls vanish. The all-male world predictably devolves into a violent dystopia, while in the parallel world women have to cope with running society in an era when, compared to today, relatively few females held high public office or were educated in other professions dominated by men.

For a while it has seemed to me that the United States split into two alternate realities in November 2020. Instead of diverging into physically different planes of existence, though, the two realities exist side by side on the same planet while nobody notices what's happened. We talk at cross-purposes to inhabitants of the alternate world under the impression that the other person lives in the same universe, and therefore we can't figure out why they don't see things that look so obvious to us.

This impression hit me afresh during a recent conversation with a person who holds political beliefs opposite from mine. The bishop of our diocese had published a message that, among other topics related to the upcoming election, warned of the possibility of violence. The person with whom I was talking dismissed the warning on the grounds that my party would have no reason to resort to violence locally because they're likely to win the majority of electoral contests in this state, as usual (which is true). And members of his party, he said, "don't riot." I inwardly gasped in disbelief. I wouldn't have said anything anyway, to avoid useless argument, but in that moment I literally could not think of a coherent answer. It seemed we were living in two distinctly different versions of this country, which somehow overlap without coinciding.

The internet and social media, of course, go a long way toward explaining how citizens can inhabit the same physical world but totally disconnected mental universes. Before the internet and cable TV, we all got our news from much the same sources. Fringe beliefs stayed on the fringe; if my memory is more or less accurate, there was a consensus about the general nature of political, historical, and social reality, regardless of vehement conflicts about details. Now, as has often been pointed out, people can stay in their own "bubbles" without ever getting undistorted exposure to opposing beliefs and concepts.

I don't have the skill to write it, but I think it would be interesting to read a science-fiction novel about a world that contains two overlapping dimensions without the inhabitants of those dimensions realizing they're not even in the same universe.

Anyway, on a brighter note, as a former co-worker of mine used to say, "Vote early, vote often."

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Reviews 68 

Purgatory's Shore 

by

Taylor Anderson 

Reviews by Jacqueline Lichtenberg haven't been indexed yet. 

Taylor Anderson's famous Destroyermen series

 builds an alternate Earth with open dimensional gateways, usually embedded in a storm at sea.  Ships from our Earth at various periods of our Earth's history seem to fall through these gates and land on this alternate Earth with no way back.

The groups that survive the gate rebuild some semblance of what they knew on our Earth, but adjust to the vicious environment on this new Earth where giant (voracious) animals command the seas and murderous non-human people swarm the land.

Anderson pits the values of our Earth's civilizations against the Nature of this untamed Earth, and reveals many flaws and strengths within our Earth's peoples.

Having created and won an entirely different World War II than they came from, the Destroyermen sail into a relative peace with rosy prospects.  

So Anderson takes us back in time to when a few ships from the newly founded USA bound for our Yucatan fall into this new Earth's much altered Gulf Coast area, somewhat off their version of Yucatan.

This novel, Purgatory's Shore, https://amazon.com/Purgatorys-Shore-Artillerymen-Book-1-ebook/dp/B08R55VC7S/ begins a new series of the adventures of strangers cascading through the vortex into this new Earth. It is called Artillerymen, as the armed force being sent to our Yucatan sported state of the art artillery units who really knew what they were doing with a canon.

Purgatory's Shore is a war novel -- and little much else. It does show us how the rag-tag survivors of the American force manage to pull together an alliance of various city-states (some not human populated) to combat a religion driven, empire building, movement which, in Destroyermen, proves to be a formidable enemy.

The book was written during the Covid-19 restrictions, and turned out somewhat different from the Destroyermen. Purgatory's Shore has much less character driven relationship and much more combat maneuvering, battle after battle.

When not in combat, the forces are repairing, regrouping and training.  

I expect the Artillerymen series to open up into much more relationship, even love story, but not Romance, as one of the main characters is a young woman who has been a member of the fighting force disguised as a boy.  It is something of a cliche, true, but Anderson has a knack with cliche that I admire.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg

http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com 

Portal Fantasies

If you stepped through a portal into a magical realm and had to choose whether to stay there permanently or live permanently in this world with no chance of revisiting the other one, what would you do?

Doubtless the choice would depend on the nature of that other realm and your happiness or unhappiness in this one, plus the presence or absence of vital relationships in your current life. Seanan McGuire's "Wayward Children" series, so far comprising EVERY HEART A DOORWAY, DOWN AMONG THE STICKS AND BONES, BENEATH THE SUGAR SKY, and IN AN ABSENT DREAM, centers on a boarding school for children and teenagers (mostly the latter) who have returned to mundane reality after living in other worlds. EVERY HEART A DOORWAY takes place at the school, founded and run by a woman who visited such a realm in her own childhood, and the subsequent novels tell the stories of various individual students. Their parents think the facility is an institution for "troubled" youth, but in fact it's a refuge for those who no longer feel at home in this world and yearn to go back to their true "homes." Only in this place can they speak the truth of their experiences without being considered mentally ill. Whether wardrobe, looking glass, rabbit hole, cyclone, enchanted picture, or whatever, most portals open only once. Some travelers find their doors again, but that happens rarely. For those who make the transit multiple times, such as the protagonist of IN AN ABSENT DREAM, there's always a final trip. The heroine of that novel faces a deadline; by the time she turns eighteen, she must make an irrevocable choice.

Of course, this premise inevitably brings Narnia to mind. The characters in EVERY HEART A DOORWAY discuss that series at one point, remarking on how the children get to visit Narnia several times, through a different portal on each occasion. One of the characters says C. S. Lewis didn't know what he was talking about; he might have heard rumors about children traveling to other worlds and just decided to develop the concept for his own narrative purposes. "That's what authors do, they make [stuff] up." In THE LAST BATTLE, all the "Friends of Narnia" get to stay there at last—except for Susan, who has managed to convince herself that their adventures were only games they'd played in childhood. (In one of his letters, Lewis says Susan may have eventually gotten back to Narnia in her own way.) Visitors to Narnia, however, don't control when they go there and return to Earth; they cross between universes by the will of Aslan. Even in THE SILVER CHAIR, when Eustace and Jill ask to be taken to Narnia, Aslan says they wouldn't have called on him unless he'd first been calling them.

In THE LIGHT BETWEEN WORLDS, by Laura E. Weymouth, three children are transported from their backyard bomb shelter in World War II to an enchanted country ruled by a lordly stag. As in Lewis's stories (and unlike in most of the alternate worlds mentioned in McGuire's series), the characters return home at the moment they left, so their parents never know they were gone. Several years later, in the postwar period, one girl remains obsessed with getting back to the magical realm, while her sister simply wants to move on with her ordinary life.

Claire, the heroine of Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series, faces a similar dilemma, in her case dealing with time travel rather than cross-dimensional travel. When she finds herself pregnant just before the battle of Culloden, she chooses to return to the twentieth century and her first husband for the unborn baby's sake. Twenty years later, when her circumstances have changed, she ultimately decides to return permanently to the eighteenth century and the love of her life in that era. Her first trip through the stone circle happens by accident, while the other two result from her own choices.

If I had the chance to visit Narnia during one of its peaceful periods and meet Aslan, I would, but only for a visit, not to stay. On the other hand, if I'd been offered such an opportunity between the ages of about eight and sixteen, I would have joyfully leaped at it and remained in the magical realm permanently. From my own experience and what I've read, it's not uncommon for a young fan of fantasy and/or SF to have a strong feeling that "there must be a place where I belong, but it's not here." Indeed, that's probably an important factor in making us fans in the first place.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Alternate Timelines

One of my favorite authors, S. M. Stirling, recently launched a new alternate-history series with BLACK CHAMBER, published in July of this year. His website has begun displaying sample chapters from the first sequel, due in spring of 2019. Reading them started me thinking about the effects small or large changes might have on the historical timeline. The POD (point of departure) for the Black Chamber universe—the moment when it diverges from our reality—occurs in 1912, when President Taft dies prematurely and Theodore Roosevelt returns to the White House (instead of Woodrow Wilson becoming President). With no constitutional term limits for the presidency at that time, Roosevelt has free rein to shape the nation according to his principles. Not only the circumstances of U.S. involvement in World War I but the direction of the entire twentieth century will change. The main story line of the novel begins in 1916.

If you could go back in time and alter the twentieth century for the better, what single action would you take? Killing Hitler before he can do any damage immediately springs to mind, of course. However, aside from the ethical problem of murdering a person who hasn't yet committed evil deeds, killing Hitler never works. TV Tropes even has a page on this topic, "Hitler's time-travel exemption." One example: In an episode of the later incarnation of THE TWILIGHT ZONE, a time traveler from the future installs herself as a servant in the household of Hitler's parents. She finally manages to kill baby Adolf along with herself. The nursery maid, however, is so terrified of Herr Hitler's probable reaction to the loss of his son that she substitutes a look-alike infant taken from a beggar woman. So history still plays out with an Adolf Hitler, just not the original one. Nonviolent ways of eliminating Hitler might work, such as preventing his parents from meeting, kidnapping the baby and having him adopted by a nice English couple, or giving young Adolf a scholarship to art school. Would forestalling his political career actually prevent the war, though? Some authors speculate that, given the conditions of post-World-War-I Europe, the Nazi Party would come to power anyway with a different, possibly worse tyrant in charge.

Arguably, the most productive single thing you could do to avert the catastrophic events of the twentieth century would be to go to Sarajevo in 1914 and arrange for Archduke Franz Ferdinand's car to be re-routed so the assassin would never have a chance to shoot him. But would the erasure of the assassination definitely prevent the Great War? The nations of Europe, with their weapons development and entangled alliances, had been building toward that conflict for decades. It's not unlikely that some other spark would have set off the conflagration anyway. Various speculative fiction authors disagree about the ease of altering the timeline. Do we embrace the "Great Man" theory, where the removal of one person makes all the difference? Or do we lean toward Heinlein's position that "when it's time for railroads, people will railroad"? In Stephen King's novel about a time traveler who tries to prevent the assassination of President Kennedy, saving Kennedy creates a major disruption in the flow of history, but not for the better.

Jo Walton's fascinating novel MY REAL CHILDREN takes a unique approach to the theme. The protagonist, as an old woman in a nursing home, remembers two different lives in two worlds (neither of them our own timeline). In one, the more prosperous and peaceful version of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, she suffers through an unhappy marriage. In the other timeline, which verges on dystopia, she has a generally happy life. If she has the power to make one of them definitively "real," which should she choose?

In most of Heinlein's time-travel fiction, he reveals that no change actually occurs, because the traveler's actions simply bring about what was destined to happen anyway. The past as we know it already includes whatever input we contribute—as in, for instance, THE DOOR INTO SUMMER. Some other writers postulate that history inevitably tries to repair itself when "damaged." Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series illustrates the elasticity of the timeline. Claire (a visitor to the eighteenth century from the twentieth) and her husband Jamie can make small changes, but all their attempts to prevent or mitigate Bonnie Prince Charlie's disastrous 1745 campaign fail. The ultimate example of this principle may be "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed," by Alfred Bester. The time traveler assassinates a series of successively more important personages without ever managing to make a permanent mark on the past.

The opposite approach postulates that the slightest change will have vast consequences—the "butterfly effect." Appropriately, Ray Bradbury provided the classic example of this theory in "A Sound of Thunder," when a member of a tourist group traveling to the age of the dinosaurs alters his own future by accidentally killing a butterfly. The trouble with this story, alas, is that if a small change that far back could shift the entire direction of history, by the traveler's present day the alterations would have snowballed to such an extent that his native time would become unrecognizable, not just subtly distorted toward a dystopian outcome. On the same principle, consider the many alternate-history stories whose authors introduce famous people from the past in different roles from their real-life ones. Actually, depending on how far back the POD occurs, random alterations in meetings, matings, and conceptions would ensure that most if not all of those people would never be born. But what fun for writers and readers would that be?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Reviews 19 by Jacqueline Lichtenberg - The Flicker Men by Ted Kosmatka

Reviews 19

by

Jacqueline Lichtenberg

The Flicker Men by Ted Kosmatka

The Flicker Men is a novel set at the intersection of math, physics, and The Soul.  It's about the nature of reality and where humans fit into reality.  

On this blog, we focus on Science Fiction Romance and Paranormal Romance, involving ourselves with the issue of Soul Mates and the Happily Ever After ending.  

The Flicker Men is about all of our topics, without being a Romance.  If you're writing science fiction romance, you need to read this novel.  Here's why. 

On the September 15, 2015 post, we focused on our surrounding "real" world and how readers who live in it are looking for the best romance books that fiction publishers are producing.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/09/targeting-readership-part-11-futurology.html

Readers who seek "escape" are looking to writers to lift them up out of the daily tizzy, to live in another world for a while and let their nerves settle down.  From that far vantage point, they can view their problems in a whole new light.

After a book vacation, a reader can return to the real world and make better decisions, execute better actions.  

Why do we seek escape reading?  Can we achieve escape from daily life by reading realistic fiction books?

We all live in different "realities" -- our subjective reality and some people believe there exists an objective reality.  Some people believe there is no objective reality, just shifting subjective landscapes.  We create our own lives as a bubble of illusion around us.  

Frankly, I lean more toward the idea that there is an objective reality, and it is a human's business to strive to define it, explore it, know it, master living in objective reality.  

But I also factor in the plasticity of human consciousness.  The things that really matter to us, as living creatures, matter because they are subjectively real.  The important part of reality is that which we perceive.  

There is one subject that brings the objective shape of Reality together with the individualistic, idiosyncratic, personalized subjective reality of each of us.

That subject is popularly known as the Art of Tarot, and it overlaps and interpenetrates the science of Astrology.

That is astrology as a science, an organized body of empirical observations, not astronomy which is also an organized body of empirical observations.  

Astrology is coincidences recorded, and maps out the ups and downs of our subjective reality where it interfaces with external events.  Tarot maps out the ups and downs of our subjective reality pretty as it responds to external Events.

Does that sound familiar to writers of romance books?  Your novel, or the stories you write, need a structure.  

Astrology can suggest plots, the sequence of life events that seem part of objective reality, outside the self, way out of a Character's control.  Tarot can suggest how a Character reacts to those Events consistent with character traits familiar to the reader.

For example, my first award winning novel, Unto Zeor, Forever, depicts the main character's Saturn Return as he walks through the Tarot lessons of the High Priestess and the Empress.

http://www.amazon.com/Unto-Zeor-Forever-Sime~Gen-Book-ebook/dp/B004MPRYEY

Science Fiction has been defined as the story of how discoveries in science impact single human beings, or civilization as a whole, or both. 

Who would you be if you lived in a galactic civilization with lots of aliens?  Or during Earth's first exploration of the stars, seeking First Contact?  

Reading a good book of that type can qualify as "escape."  But even better, it can qualify as another perspective on your life, your identity, and the possibilities for solving your current real-world problems to get on to the next phase of your existence.

For decades, the best astronomers accepted the mathematical analysis that said the existence of other planets, never mind planets enough like Earth to harbor life as we know it, was so improbable as to be impossible.

So Alternate Universes and Fantasy Genre became a very popular form of fiction.

Now Hubble and other imaging sources have provided proof that there are other planets, some of them within the "life as we know it" zone.  "Life" is still a big maybe, but traces and hints are turning up indicating there are DNA chains and complex chemicals "out there."  

So science fiction is coming  back into fashion with interplanetary and galactic stories such as we looked at last week with Jean Johnson's "Theirs Not To Reason Why" series.

She used an entirely plausible depiction of TIME as the basis for taking the reader into a new perspective.  Her main character, Ia, is a precognitive who can scan the life events of individuals and their descendents for a thousand years.

After the TV Series Numb3rs (available on Amazon Instant Video) popularized the practical applications of some very esoteric mathematics, we have seen more popular science articles explaining how astrophysicists are applying mathematics to unravel the fabric of space-time, defining and re-defining what a "particle" is/might be and what waves have to do with that.

Einstein's Relativity is holding up well, but there are applications where it does not seem adequate.

The part of the theory that pertains to The Flicker Men by Ted Kosmatka is neatly summarized here:
http://www.space.com/17661-theory-general-relativity.html

Here is a classic graphic showing the Earth's gravity well.  Note how as you get closer to Earth, the shape of the boxes changes, so it takes different amounts of "Time" to traverse a box depending on where you are.

Space and Time are not separate.  OK, some recent work is showing Einstein's model fraying at the edges.  It may not be the whole story, but it's very dependably real where it does apply.

Einstein didn't have any satellites to experiment with.  He came up with this idea via mathematics and physics.  It was a totally useless fantasy for his world.  It is the basis of our current space program explorations.  And it is the basis of discoveries being made in particle physics.

To understand the infinitely large, one must have a solid understanding of the infinitely "small."

"Large" and "Small" are concepts that can not be defined without using "space" (the 3 physical dimensions, Height, Width, Depth).

If a thing doesn't have "size" how can it "be?"

Well, how big is your Soul?  How much does it weigh?

We can measure the "brain" but have not yet "located" (in space) the Soul.  Therefore, people who study this kind of thing have a hard time including "Soul" in their model of Reality.

Thus reading Romance Novels is "escape" for them because the best romance novels are about Soul Mates.  Free Romance Novels are flying off Amazon's virtual shelves very likely because  spending time in a universe where Souls are real is just the escape that is sought by Romance Reader.

The most profound thing I've ever learned about Souls came via a course on Kabbalah, where I learned the soul enters the material world through the dimension of Time.  Not SPACE -- but TIME.  The Soul exists through TIME -- but not SPACE.  The brain exists through SPACE and TIME.

Another thing I learned from Kabbalah while writing the 5 books on Tarot
http://astore.amazon.com/simegen-20?node=4&page=1
is that the Soul descends into the body in stages, starting at conception and proceeding (I think by quantum leaps) to the threshold of sexual maturity at about 13.  This theory produces a unique paradigm for child-rearing, setting expectations expanding as the Soul gains a better grip on the animal body.  Given knowledge of what will be expected of him/her at given birthdays, and training to rise to that new level, maturity unfolds in a more steady way.

A fictional character given the advantage of such an upbringing, such an understanding of Body and Soul and their Relationship is better able to cope with the challenges of meeting a Soul Mate.

Working on the current exalted level, cutting edge mathematicians are now inventing the mathematics being used to describe and hunt for particles such as the Higgs Boson and Dark Matter and mini black holes.

Armed with great new mathematical tools, particle physicists have revved up the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2015 to run  to see what happens at the smallest level.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/large-hadron-collider-could-show-parallel-universes-exist-say-researchers-1.3006998
-----------QUOTE-----------
Scientists will be watching for the existence of mini black-holes when the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator becomes fully operational this spring, because the detection of those black holes could change what we know about how gravity works, according to a new physics paper.

The existence of the mini black holes would lend support to string theory, which posits that different dimensions could exist and parallel universes are possible, according to a paper by physicists Mir Faizal, Mohammed M. Khalil and Ahmed Farag Ali, published in the current issue of the journal Physics Letters B.
----------END QUOTE-------------

So the long standing science fiction premise of "alternate universes" --

Here is Jack of Eagles by James Blish (who wrote SPOCK MUST DIE many years later).  This cover

Jack of Eagles by James Blish

is from the 1982 Avon Edition, but it was probably first published in 1952, possibly based on a 1941 concept.

Here is a story description from Google:
---------QUOTE-------------
Danny Caiden is on the run - from the FBI, the SEC, the Justice Department and the Mob. Only recently, Danny was an average New York copywriter, until he suddenly found he had ESP...
----------END QUOTE-----------



The kind of ESP Danny Caiden developed had to do with "hearing" telepathic voices and leakages across universes, across Time. Other than that hypothesis, the book was pretty standard, built on what might, today, be called a book writing template.

So speculation such as Jean Johnson used in her Theirs Not To Reason Why series has been around since the 1930's, but though there has been a lot of work done in the field of Einstein's Relativity, it's only recently that hard-science experiments and long-range-observations from orbit have inched us closer to understanding Space-Time and the whole Wave/Particle thing.

Ted Kosmatka has picked up the thread started by James Blish -- even if Kosmatka had never heard of Jack of Eagles -- and breathed Soul into the speculations of mathematicians and particle physicists.

What if there are other "dimensions" -- whole universes adjacent to ours?  What if the "fabric" of space-time was thinned at some point and penetrated?  What would we learn?  What would we risk?  What has that to do with Space, Time, and Soul?

The TV Series Warehouse 13 explored this to some extent, as did The TV Series Sliders, but even more to the point, the TV Series Fringe gave us more possibilities.  These shows popularized the basic idea, as did Star Trek (the famous ST:ToS episode Mirror Mirror, and also did Time Travel).  Quantum Leap took us back in time, and focused on "repairing" or fixing things that went "wrong."  But Quantum Leap didn't dwell on the mathematics of Space and Time.

If you travel in "Time" -- you will likely land in empty space because the Earth MOVED as did the Sun.  So if you travel back in Time, you must also move through space to where the Earth was "then."  So Sliders seems to me more plausible than Quantum Leap.  But Quantum Leap dealt with the concept of Soul in a quantized universe.

All these popular TV Series have given the general public a notion about alternate realities formerly familiar only to science fiction readers, but that notion is, "It's a nice story, but I know the difference between fiction and reality."

Any scientist working on the cutting edge of these astrophysics and particle physics investigations knows the difference between objective reality and subjective fiction.  Most of these people live in objective reality, using imagination to push at the edges of human knowledge.

Most of these people are very certain the Soul does not "exist" because it has never been "found."

If the Soul has no spacial dimensions, then it will never be "found," unless we learn something about "time" that we don't know now.

So currently, scientists working at the edge of this "alternate universe" discovery are very certain about a few things they do know and they tend to be dedicated to objective reality.

One distinctive hallmark of good science fiction is that the plot turns on a discovery.  When that discovery confounds the scientist and derails the very sanity of the discoverer, you get the very best science fiction.

That is the issue that Ted Kosmatka deals with in The Flicker Men.



Kosmatka starts with a man, Eric Argus, a theoretical mathematical physicist who is renowned in his field for papers published.  Nobody knows why Argus quit, walked away, disappeared.  We meet him when he's just barely recovering from bouts of drunken stupor.  A friend gives him a job in a think tank, -- no assignment, just do some new original research, we won't tell you what to do.

He languishes around the place, meeting people seemingly at random, knowing he's on probation and has to write up something to present to the board -- but has no ideas.

He refuses to touch the work he was doing just before he walked off into a drunken haze.

Then "out of the blue" he discovers a bit of antique equipment in storage, unpacks it and replicates the classic double-slit experiment that demonstrates the wave/particle properties of a photon.  He also rigs up the detector that illustrates that an observer changes the photon being observed.

But his time-wasting doodling around with an unproductive experiment produces an odd discovery.  If it is an animal that observes, the change in the observed particle does not happen.

So he tests other scientists, and they all produce change when they observe.  He tests all kinds of animals at the zoo, and none produce change.

An anti-abortion group gets wind of the experiment, decides the difference in results of observation changing reality and decides the agent of change upon observation is the Soul.  They want to prove that fetuses have Souls in the womb and therefore must not be aborted.

Their experiment on the unborn produces mixed results.  Some fetuses produce the change, and some do not.  The results are the same regardless of developmental stage - some do, some don't.

The question then is do all adults have enough Soul to create change when observing?

So one of his colleagues takes off to test a lot of people to see if their observations change "objective reality."

The answer he finds is that no, not every adult human can observe and produce change in the observed.

This is confounding beyond belief.

The social fabric is stressed.  People try to kill him, destroy the place he works.

Against his will, Argus is driven to pick up the threads of the work he had dropped -- and we discover what scared him to the depths of his soul, left him deranged, depressed, and unable to think about the subject.

He has created a window into an alternate universe.

Things get even stranger from there.

You have to read the book to discover what Eric Argus does about all this, and what effect his actions have on his objective and subjective realities.

Is "The Soul" real?  Does it matter?  Can science detect Soul?

This is not a Romance Novel.  Eric Argus barely interacts with anyone.  He has known and related to people previously, but does not connect with them now.  He meets a lot of people now, but does not deeply connect with them though he obviously is capable of caring about others.

The story is about Eric Argus making his personal peace with the concept that The Soul is real.

The plot is about the scientific community and the general public coming to grips with the concept that The Soul is real.

The ending is about the question, "Does humanity really need to know that The Soul is real?"  That question is complicated by discoveries about how alternate universes are generated.

There's some cutting edge speculative mathematics woven into Kosmatka's ending involved in seeing our world as a hologram.  That's a subject hitting the popular press now.

http://discovermagazine.com/2011/jun/03-our-universe-may-be-a-giant-hologram
Our Universe May Be a Giant Hologram
Physicist Brian Greene explains how properties at the black hole’s surface—its event horizon—suggest the unsettling theory that our world is a mere representation of another universe, a shadow of the realm where real events take place.

When we learn to model our universe as a complete hologram, we generate another Universe in the chain which causes destruction of prior universes.  Those living in prior universes naturally want to stop us from modeling the universe as a hologram, thus destroying them.  Can the Soul fix that problem just by observing?

How would you feel if you had no Soul, but others did?

There is a lot more to be written on this topic, especially in the Romance genre.

While the Large Hadron Collider is in hot pursuit of Dark Matter, is NASA in hot pursuit of The Soul?

If there is no such thing as a Soul, then there can be no such thing as a Soul Mate, and thus the Romance Genre can only write about sex, not happiness.

Do you want to escape to a world where Souls are real?  What if you had a Soul, but others don't?  What if the reason so many people don't believe the Happily Ever After ending can be objective reality is that you can't have it without a Soul?

Maybe everyone has a Soul, but not every child is raised under conditions that allow the soul to descend and possess the body?

Maybe that non-possessed-by-Soul condition is the source of all the spooky stories about Possession by demons or whatever?

If you want to write your romance novel, you should read The Flicker Men and James Blish's Jack of Eagles.

Neither has any Romance in it, but they describe a world that would be confounded by scientific evidence, undeniable proof, of the existence and function of Soul.

Think about how climate science has become "settled science" - that denying what we know presently is tantamount to being without a Soul.  Suppose the general public accepted scientific proof of the Soul with just as much fervor as we now accept man-made climate change?

What sort of an objective reality would that be?  What sort of fiction would be created to escape that reality?

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg