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RC: Your novel - HIDDEN VARIABLES: A Quantum Comedy - is coming out this week. What's it about? 

 

BD: It's a phantasmagorical journey. It takes place in a town in upstate New York that's so ignored by the world that it disappears. The guy who goes there -- the narrator of the book -- has been told by his sister that she believes her husband was murdered there. One of the complications is that when a town disappears, so do the cycles of life and death. Everyone in the town is immortal. So, he's trying to solve a murder in a town where everybody lives forever. I call it a quantum comedy because the town is so obscure it's fallen off the time/space continuum. It's a book with laughs that still asks a basic question: why the hell are we here? Sometimes I say, Einstein, with laughs. Somebody called it a modern Gulliver’s Travels. I think that’s pretty close.

 

RC: It's called Hidden Variables. What does that mean? Where did you get the title from?

 

BD: Hidden variables is a concept that Einstein proposed, as did other scientists, that at the end of the day we can never really know anything because there are too many hidden variables. The heart of the comedy of the book is that here we are walking around, eating, doing all the things that we do, talking to one another, falling in love, falling out of love, having jobs, living and dying, and we really don't know why we are here. 

 

RC: Why did you write this book, as opposed to another book?

 

BD: This was very much about my lifelong exploration of quantum physics but it’s also in the voice of an ex-TV reporter now stranded in the gig economy writing “digital content” about the patio furniture industry. So, he’s kind of disappeared too. It’s about immortality but it also asks a question about eternal life – is it worth the trouble?

 

RC: Why should anyone read this? That's an odd way of putting it. Let me rephrase it. Who's it for? What kind of readers will be interested in this book?

 

BD: People who share the question that I ask pretty regularly. What the hell are we doing here in the first place? And readers who want to explore some of the scientific levels of that question. But also, hopefully, for the laughs, a whole menagerie of wild characters, including God Herself, who find themselves in this town that’s slipped right off the time/space continuum.

 

RC: I was recently looking at the essay by Orwell, my man, "Why I Write". Why do you write?

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BD: That's quite a question. I think it's a compulsion. It's something I always felt I simply couldn't live without, over many years, continuously trying to find the inner voice that I wanted to express. This is the novel where I think I finally got it right.