In Crouch’s SF thriller Dark Matter, quantum physicist Jason Dessen gets abducted into a world in which the quantum many-worlds theory has become a fully realized technology for interdimensional transfer.
In Dark Matter, you achieve a fusion of thriller intensity and science fiction speculation. Did the book start with the SF idea, the thriller plot, or a blend of both?
The book started with my fascination with quantum mechanics. The notion that the way particles behave on the subatomic level might somehow effect or parallel the way our lives play out in the classical world was a concept that transfixed me for the last decade. I just wasn’t sure how to write it, how to take something as mind-bending and counterintuitive as quantum mechanics and meld it into a story that people would care about.
Your Wayward Pines books have been developed into a television series, and you have yet another TV series under development. How do you balance writing novels and being involved with television production?
Writing and producing television very much speaks to the extroverted part of my personality. I love collaboration, the joint effort of hundreds of people working together to create something. But the other part of who I am is extremely introverted. I love being alone and dreaming up ideas and writing novels. And I generally find that those moments of crazy inspiration happen when I’m very quiet. Balance between these worlds isn’t something I seek out; the tension between extroverted film/TV writing and introverted novel writing make up the two conflicting and yet somehow complementary parts of my creative identity.
Jason Dessen must face an alternate reality that exists without his marriage or his son. At the same time, his wife has an alternate version of her husband to contend with. What are some of the emotional consequences of the switch that you explore?
What interested me most about this dynamic was how a relationship between two people might change based upon different choices they’d made in their past. In other words, would my relationship with my partner be markedly different if I were a mechanic instead of a writer? Are we still the same people on a far deeper level? Would we share the same connection, even if our respective histories were completely different?
Would you ever want to swap worlds with an alternate version of yourself?
No. Never. In fact, I think that’s the entire point of Dark Matter. The idea of the road not taken is... wait, nope. I think to get the answer to this question, you have to read the book.
