June 8th, 2023
I am not God, but I do spend a whole lot of damn time creating life.
Sometimes I’m constructing the lives of animals, or inventing superheroes with superreal problems, or dreaming up a boy who feels more alive when he sleeps, or designing the future on a planet that never thaws.
So where does that big bang originate?
For Cold World, I have Stephen Hawking to thank.
Some writers use too many words to tell stories that need far less; Hawking can write a sentence that can create a universe.
I always tell people who want to write to read, and to read about things that they don’t know much about, outside their comfort zone. I love and regularly read comic books, graphic novels and anything Star Wars for my personal enjoyment, but I also read a lot of books, essays and articles on science, history, writing, comedy, the environment, philosophy, spirituality and even things like gossip columns and critic reviews.
Anything to give me a longer, wider perspective on life and humanity, and a bigger creative sandbox to play in.
I had read Hawking’s A Brief History of Time and loved it, and wanted to read something of his that isn’t as well-known. Brief Answers to the Big Questions was highly recommended, and I sat down to read it two winters ago; the ideas inside gave me the raw ingredients I needed to grow a future that was both plausible and thematically rich.
I am not the smartest boy. I am really not. Science-fiction is a genre I adore, but realistically building a world using current and potential science had been terrifying to me — until I read Hawking, who makes tomorrow feel accessible. A lot of the real science in Cold World owes him a massive debt.
(I’m also a huge Brian Greene fan if you’re into reading friendly, accessible science.)
Cold World isn’t about the science, though; I knew what I really wanted to talk about.
But I wanted to construct it on a solid base of real stuff, to borrow some of the magic Hawking used on me, to write sentences that could create universes in someone else’s mind.
The Den 