IndiePendent Books guest blog, Martin Chatterton

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The End is Nigh

Since I wasn’t given any particular subject to blog about by the kind folk at IndiePendent, I thought I might just say a few words about how my latest meisterwork, ‘The Brain Full of Holes’ (available at all good outlets from Peachtree Books) came about. Who knows, it might prompt someone to buy it although I have to admit it’s a bit of a mystery to me why people want to hear what writers have to say. There is a hideous worldwide conspiracy to dupe the reading public into believing that writers have some insight into reality that is denied ordinary mortals. The truth is that authors – especially the well-known and successful ones – don’t know squat. Fortunately I’m neither very well-known or particularly successful (are you allowed to say that in the US?) so feel well qualified to spout off.

Writers are strange; all of ‘em, no exceptions. We don’t have proper jobs. We spend most of our days wearing scruffy clothes, drinking diet coke and avoiding work, mainly by trawling the internet in an aimless fashion until our eyeballs melt. Or, at least, that’s what I do. Consequently, most days end with a vague and queasy feeling that I’m wasting what’s left of my life. Which I probably am. To paraphrase the great Bill Bailey, the universe, although still expanding, is slowing, and will, eventually succumb to the laws of entropy and collapse in on itself, thereby rendering all human activity ultimately pointless. Which makes me feel much better about spending so much time uploading video clips to Facebook and looking at questionable pictures of misbehaving celebrities.

From time to time though, I do happen across something that jerks me out of my customary slumber and prompts me to write. In the case of ‘The Brain Full of Holes’, it was a news story about the Large Hadron Collider being constructed in Switzerland. For those of you unfamiliar with this, the LHC is, basically, a gigantic circular tube buried deep under the Alps, through which scientists will fire particles into one another at incredible speeds, hoping (amongst other things) to replicate and observe what happened at the moment the universe began.

Heavy.

So heavy in fact, that some people began to call this contraption ‘The Doomsday Machine’ and several over-excitable Indians committed suicide when the switch on took place.

My interest was in that bit the scientists didn’t talk about. Namely, that despite there being in excess of six thousand scientists taking part in the LHC project, none of them knew what might happen. The suicidal Indians were worried about the collapse of the universe (although to me, killing yourself doesn’t seem like a logical response to fear of imminent death) but I was intrigued by the fringe possibilities the LHC experiments might throw up. I did some more internet research and discovered, to my horror, that there’s an awful lot we don’t know about the stuff that constitutes the entire universe. Atoms, for example, are almost completely empty. By that I mean that they contain an incredibly small amount of actual matter. The rest is either empty, or, more likely, consists of stuff we can’t see.

Aha, I thought. This means the LHC project could reveal hidden worlds, open up parallel universes, create wormholes in the space-time continuum (I don’t know what that actually is, but I like to use the phrase to make me seem like I know what I’m talking about) and other mind-blowing possibilities.

I’d written ‘The Brain Finds A Leg’ about the self-styled ‘World’s Greatest Detective’ and all round egghead, Theo Brain, and figured that putting him at the centre of a Large Hadron Collider-type plot might be fun. Since I like to write books that take you to places you can’t go in real life, I was good to go. Luckily I’d already given Theo Brain a Swiss background via his guardian, Captain Schnurrbart of the Swiss International Science Tactical Response Unit. When The Brain and his sidekick, Sheldon McGlone, relocate to Switzerland from Australia the stage is set.

I think the book works; it certainly makes me laugh – I’m one of those very sad cases who finds their own work funny – but I’d like to think that there’s enough thought-provoking material in there to lift it out of the simply farcical. Carnivorous cuckoo-clocks? Two-headed butlers? Scientists turned into raisins? This stuff could happen. The experts can’t say it won’t.

And, since we’re all living in a collapsing universe, if I’m wrong it doesn’t matter*.

*inside joke.

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