A. A. ATTANASIO

I’m a novelist obsessed with the power of fiction to impart strangeness, hermetic wisdom and, above all, wonder. I’ve published 22 novels and two short story collections. Most of my stories are science fiction and fantasy, a couple historical – and one, my only collaboration, a biker novel. My obsession with creative writing began in childhood, during the early ‘60s, with the threat of thermonuclear holocaust. The certainty of imminent apocalypse provoked a personal quest for answers to those ultimate questions everyone asks: where do we come from? Where do we go when we die? What exactly is reality? I was appalled to discover that there are no answers. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, Gödel’s incompleteness theorem and Wittgenstein’s limits of logic prove conclusively that reality is unknowable. All answers to those ultimate questions are fantasies.

Even more astonishing for me in my adolescence were the revelations of quantum mechanics. Over a hundred years ago, Einstein demonstrated that time is an illusion. In his famous thought experiment, he rode a beam of light and discovered that there is no interval of spacetime from one end of a light beam to the other. At the speed of light, time slows to zero. No time at all passes for a particle of light, a photon – and the instant of emission is the same as the instant of reception! Same with space. At the speed of light, space contracts to a point of no dimension. A photon traverses no distance at all. The truth is that reality is instantaneous, and there are no boundaries. So, when you look up at the stars and receive photons that have been traveling for hundreds, thousands or millions of years, how did those photons ‘know’ when they left those distant suns that you would be there to receive them? You were always there.

     
   
     
The bizarre facts of science conclusively determine that what we call reason and logic is a human fantasy. With this insight, my obsession with strangeness began. Writing is an ideal medium for this preoccupation with reality and fantasy, because the written form is excruciatingly logical (constrained by grammar) and yet possesses the ability to express the irrational. What a wonderful contradiction! No matter how colossal and weird the lobster-man that comes through the wormhole, it is sentenced to the sentence, and it walks that line sober as a judge. Fiction writers are mental bondage freaks; nevertheless, within their constraints they can go anywhere: they can even travel faster than light, if they want, and arrive before they leave. So, while awaiting the end of the world, I write fiction. Still waiting, still writing. Along the way, I married, reared two daughters and have been satisfying a childhood fascination with Hawaiian theophany. There are other worlds all around us that science knows about yet cannot see. We feel their presence. Art is the courage to say hello.