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This transcript contains select parts of our interview, edited for length and clarity. View the complete interview on Substack, or on You Tube. Or listen to the podcast.
From Fact to Fiction
Linda: Thank you very much for joining us today on From Fact to Fiction, where we unpack the truth behind my favorite specialty thrillers. Think Michael Crichton, Daniel Suarez, A.G.Riddle.
And while these works may differ in subgenre, each immerses the reader in a new but realistic world. And the best of these blend fact with fiction so well, it's impossible to tell the difference, right? We don't know what is, what could be, and what's totally impossible.
It would take an expert to know.
So each week I'll meet up with an expert and we'll select a new specialty thriller. We'll talk about why we love the book and unpack the truth behind the fiction.
Introducing Immortality
Linda: Today we're going to review Kevin Boaz's book, Immortality, with Kevin himself as our expert.
We're so lucky and so excited to have you today. And Kevin, your first book is now over 15 years old. But, like the great specialty thrillers, like Daniel Suarez's Demon, which was 2009, or Michael Crichton's Prey, which is now 20 years old (and also has nanotechnology in it), all of yours and theirs are still so relevant.
I write techno thrillers too, but I don't think I'm that smart to write a book that 15 or 20 years later is still going to be right on. So kudos to you for that.
Immortality is a big book. I think it's an epic techno-thrilling saga,
Kevin: (Laughs) I agree.
Linda: I think Chuck Wendig's Wanderers is similar. If you've not read it, it's wonderful. I think it's a 2019 book. And like Wanderers, you've got a lot of details in terms of your characters.
You really bring out the science and the “doing science” part of it. And of course, we have apocalyptic moments as well.
So, for readers out there I have a recommendation. Don't read this book trying to guess where it's going, which as a writer, is what I tend to do. And this is not a plane ride. It's a cross country trip along back roads. And you're the passenger. So strap in and let it guide you. Enjoy the ride. That's my recommendation.
Your book starts out with a microbiologist working in the field with his young student/lover. But then it flips on its head and all hell breaks loose with a killing plague that seems both biological and chemical at the same time. Our intrepid researcher is tapped by the CDC to find out what's happening.
And…we're not going to say more so that we don’t give away anything.
I confess, I hadn't read Immortality before, and I was missing out. And it's so relevant in today's world with our cutting-edge controversial science, killing pandemics, and the impact of climate change. Unfortunately, still so relevant, right?
Kevin: It's crazy, actually, that it still is.
Keeping the Science Realistic
Linda: All right, well, let's get into the science behind Immortality. This quote came from your website, and I try to adhere to this in my stories as well.
You said, “Every bit of inventive technology in my stories either exists or could exist. Every scenario in my story is theoretically possible.”
So I'd love to hear what you mean by that and how you abide by that.
Kevin: Well, yeah, as I mentioned, I started life as a scientist and engineer. So, I put just a ton of work into these books. My background material is usually many times the length of the book itself.
And when I say that it's all possible, I don't mean that it's possible today in some cases, but plausible might be a slightly better word.
For example, there are a lot of books with FTL, Faster Than Light Travel, but that's really probably not possible. So I would never write about that [in my techothrillers]. Same thing with time travel. I would never write about it because it just is highly unlikely that we will ever accomplish these things.
As I go through the science. I actually design on paper almost everything that's in the novels. Again, I don't want to give away stuff, but for example, in Immortality, the CDC has level four labs. And there really wasn't [much information on] level four at that point. So, I sat down, did my research for God knows how long, designed it, figured out how it could work.
There's so much thought put into it, and it's obviously not perfect. But that's really the process: I design it all as if I were a scientist or engineer.
(Note - Kevin is a scientist and engineer!)
Bacteria and Extinction Level Events
Linda: I want to talk about the premise of your book, and see what inspired you. An age-old bacteria is responsible for historic extinction level events, and how that might happen again today. Can you talk to me a little bit about little baby bugs or bacteria?
Kevin: Yeah. One of the things that we don't really know is what happened even 5,000 years ago or 6,000 years ago. That's when written history started.
But we're talking about dinosaurs and extinction events. We're going back 65 million years, hundreds of millions of years.
One of the main characters in the novel is a paleobiologist. And he looks at these past events and tries to figure out what is going on.
I certainly don't think that bacteria were the cause of the last big extinction with the dinosaurs. But there are so many mysteries around it, and we as scientists don't really talk about the mysteries. We talk about what we know as best we can know it. And we don't like to talk about what we don't know.
And so in the books, I talk about what we don't know. For example, the fossil record that we have, that a lot of this is based on, contains less than 1% of all the species that are ever alive.
Linda: No way.
Kevin: Yes, it's just a tiny fraction. And someone estimated that 4.5 with 27 zeros is the number of creatures that have been alive on this planet. So we actually have records of the tiniest fraction of the creatures that have ever lived.
So this big asteroid comes down, smashed 65,000 million years ago, and creates a cataclysm.
But the mysteries are that huge creatures survived in the ocean. Sharks, all sorts of big, big creatures. Fragile creatures like coral survived in the ocean. In small freshwater areas, fragile creatures, salamanders, things like that, survived. Alligators survived.
All these big and small, small, fragile, and big, powerful creatures survived and dinosaurs didn't. (Well, for a long time we thought they didn't but now we know there are avian dinosaurs, and the avian dinosaurs, well they did just fine.)
Now everything on this planet must have suffered during this little big bang, but why did these creatures, this specific family of creatures die out?
And so in the novel, I say that disease finished them off, bacteria, this, chromatium.
This is what one of the main characters, a paleobiologist, is researching. He sees this pattern of extinctions. Maybe they were not totally cataclysmic extinctions, but mass extinctions that occur again and again and again.
And he starts to see that there's a connection between that and this bacterium.
Linda: The idea that bacteria or a virus…the idea that humanity is likely to be brought down by the smallest of things rather than the biggest of things. I don't think that's too far-fetched at all, so kudos there.
Bacteria, Nanoparticles and Cooperation
Linda: I don't think we can talk about all of this without discussing nanoparticles and bacteria and how little tiny things can work together.
This process is called complex systems for our audience. When you have lots of little tiny… pieces or organisms or computer code or whatever it is working together to bring out behavior that's greater than the sum of the parts.
An example is ants. Ants have 400 brain cells. And so an ant on its own is pretty dumb, but ants together follow a few rules and build great things.
In your book we get into trouble because these little individual, very small beings actually work together to kind of band up against humanity, right? What was your inspiration for this?
Kevin: I don't think initially, I was trying to be symbolic with it. But a big thing that I've always been concerned about and interested in is competition versus cooperation.
And, I think about how our bodies are really very much what you're talking about, too. You know, we have all these tiny little cells, which have absolutely no computational power. And yet, we emerge from it.
Now, you can speculate forever how this happens and if we're even in our heads or maybe we’re a spirit and we're just…
Linda: (Laughs.) Hey, we only have an hour.
Kevin: But, I think what brought me to this was the idea that cooperation is such a powerful, powerful thing. And I see so many examples in society where people disregard that and they think it's okay to have things just function without any central intelligence at all.
And so that was part of what compelled me to write about it. I think that was probably subconscious at first, but when I look at what I wrote and I thought, oh yeah, well, that's probably where that came from.
So it was looking at the world around me and the people, and how we were not working as well together as we should.
We Are All Interconnected
Kevin: Something that was in my heart and my mind when I was writing Immortality was the Gaia idea that we're all interconnected.
We're all part of some big, big whole, and you know maybe out of that whole that we are emerges God. Maybe we're the neurons in God's mind or and maybe that God is the neuron in someone other god's mind.
Linda: Yes we're so arrogant to assume that we're it.
Kevin: Yeah, we're the center of the universe.
Conclusion: Fact, Fiction or Something In Between?
Linda: I encourage everybody to go out and listen or read Immortality, a wonderful epic technothrilling saga.
Thank you for your time. I hope Kevin is going to join us in the future to review some other technothrillers. And we'll talk about the science behind them–the truth behind the fiction–how much is true, how much is fiction.
And I'm going to ask you one last question, about the premise of your book.
Ancient bacteria can be the undoing of mankind, fact or fiction?
Kevin: Boy, I think it's possible. Or maybe a virus, but some tiny microbe.
Linda: Okay, can ancient microbes be the undoing of mankind?
Kevin: I think yes, because we have removed all the firewalls. We travel great distances now in airplanes and boats and trains. So those natural firewalls that existed for our entire existence are gone. So I think, yeah.
Linda: Again, thank you Kevin, for joining us. And I hope everybody goes out and gets Immortality and enjoys it. We will keep you posted on Kevin's upcoming releases and all of the other new book reviews that we do. Thank you again for joining us, and have a great day.
Thoughts?
What do you think about Kevin’s premise? Are we all interconnected, and can the smallest of beings impact us the most? Let me know!
Cheers!
Linda
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