A Life Full of Quarks received a 4+ star review, making it an IndieReader Approved title.
Following find an interview with author C. W. Johnson.
What is the name of the book and when was it published?
My novel is “A Life Full of Quarks,” published in September, 2024.
What’s the book’s first line?
“When I was young, I wanted to be a paleontologist, to unearth things both terrifying and long dead.”
What’s the book about? Give us the “pitch”.
A Life Full of Quarks is a darkly comic tale of science, family, loneliness, and love, the hilariously heartbreaking story of a young scientist.
Growing up in a family of brilliant scientists, John Chant had many strange adventures, encountering vengeful dinosaurs, deadly cosmic rays, a runaway alien astronaut, oversized friends, an omelet competition, and an experimental chimpanzee. Later he goes to a circus, a nuclear lab, graduate school, an underground lair, and eventually lands a faculty position at a fourth-tier university. Along the way he meets poets and crackpots, alcoholics and cancer victims, geniuses and frauds and monsters. Through it all John explores the fantastical mysteries of the universe, including the biggest mystery of all: love.
What inspired you to write the book? A particular person? An event?
Originally, this started off as a nonfiction book about science, but it soon morphed into a fictional memoir. I wanted to write a unique story, one that only I could have written, and I poured into it all my personal mythology, taking ideas from poems and unfinished stories and untold stories I had amassed over the years.
What’s the main reason someone should really read this book?
You may not realize it, but you’ve been longing to read a book that’s unlike any other, that doesn’t fit into any genre cubbyhole, that’s a quantum superposition of coming-of-age memoir, magical realism, science fiction, and academic satire. You’ve also been longing to read a novel that talks about ‘quantum superposition’ but in a way that is bitterly funny and not off-putting, the way your calculus course was.
What’s the most distinctive thing about the main character? Who-real or fictional-would you say the character reminds you of?
The main character, John, has been given many gifts such as intelligence and curiosity, but also honesty and kindness. The former lead him into wacky misadventures, while the latter guide him on the best, though not the shortest, path out.
Many authors will admit, if you slip them a crisp $50 bill, that their characters, both heroes and villains, reflect different aspects of themselves. John echoes my love of science, my overthinking, and, although exaggerated, my childhood and young adult loneliness, but his father and his mother and his sister, and Freddy Pigeon and Prof. Huey Hile, and Erstmann Codd and Baka Becker, also have little pieces of me embedded in them. The chimpanzee might be an exception.
If you were to slip me a $100 bill, I might also confess that Shevek, the scientist-hero of Ursula LeGuin’s great science fiction novel The Dispossessed, has a lot in common with John.
When did you first decide to become an author?
I first started writing my own stories in middle school. They were terrible.
Is this the first book you’ve written?
This is the first book I have published. In high school, I wrote several terrible novels. In college, I wrote some short stories that were merely mediocre. By the time I finished graduate school, I actually had sold a short story for real money. Since then, I have published, for money, more than sixteen short stories, mostly science fiction. But this is the first completed novel that has been read by more than one other person.
What do you do for work when you’re not writing?
It should surprise absolutely no one who reads the novel that by day I am in fact a physics professor.
Would you go traditional if a publisher came calling? If so, why?
Probably, because I grew up when ‘traditional publishing’ was the only route that did not garner derisive snorts, although my friends who are successful authors tell me the industry has changed over the past couple of decades.
Is there something in particular that motivates you (fame? fortune?)
Although like most writers I have daydreams of fame and fortune, I really just wanted to write something that was wholly and recognizably my own, a story which could only have been written by C. W. Johnson.
Which book do you wish you could have written?
This one. A Life Full of Quarks. I wanted to write exactly the book I wished I could find, and mostly I think I succeeded.