Impact

Douglas Preston Interview

Wyman Ford is featured in Impact, as he was in your last solo book Blasphemy -do you think you’ll continue writing about him, or might your focus turn back to the Broadbents, or to entirely new characters?
DP: I’m working on another Wyman Ford idea. I rather like him. I conceived him as a short, walk-on part in Tyrannosaur Canyon, someone who would be in just a few scenes and that’s it. But he hijacked the story, so to speak, and ended up being one of the key players. And now he won’t go away. He will be involved in another unusual investigation.. On the other hand, I have no doubt the Broadbents will also star in a future novel So keep tuned.

A scary substance called “strange matter” plays a key role in your plot. Is it real, or did you make it up?
DP: It’s real. The physicist Frank Wilczek, who won a Nobel Prize in 2004 for his research into quarks, has worked extensively on the theoretical properties of strange matter (also called quark matter). Some years ago in an article in Scientific American he warned that there might be a slight probability of a powerful particle accelerator creating a strangelet or bit of strange matter that might get stuck in the earth and eventually destroy it.

Your novel starts out jumping between widely-scattered characters who seem as if they could have no connection. Then all the pieces snap neatly together. Do you usually write starting from an outline, or did the connections emerge as you went along?
DP: I work from a general outline. Usually I know where I’m starting, and I know where I’d like to end up, but the journey itself is shrouded in mystery. Writing should be an adventure, not a painting by numbers, and so I avoid starting out with a too-detailed outline. In the case of IMPACT, I knew from the beginning that the two plotlines would converge in some way. The specifics only came to me as I wrote the book.

There was a lively debate going on our club's website between club members who felt that Blasphemy was offensive to Christians and those who considered it more on the satirical side. Do you think that Impact will get that same kind of response?
DP: Not at all. IMPACT doesn’t delve into questions of religion. There is nothing, I hope, offensive in the book to anyone. It is just a story about two girls who go meteorite hunting after they witness a fall, hoping to sell it on eBay… and find something beyond imagining. To those who thought Blasphemy was offensive to Christians: I might just point out that the hero of that novel, Wyman Ford, is a devout Catholic who spent several years in a Benedictine monastery. The so-called ‘Christians’ in Blasphemy are anything but. Yes, the novel is satirical but it also contains a serious message. The real blasphemy (as I express in the novel) are those who claim with certainty to know the mind of God and who proceed to inform the rest of us exactly what He thinks.