Q&A with Louis Jones discussion

Please post your questions about my previous and upcoming works here.

Enjoying all of the discussion of dirt, earth, and soil in the diaries section of http://louisbjones.com, kind of like Roger and Mark needing pocketfuls of the stuff in Particles and Luck Somehow, I've got some catching up to do; I missed a novel since that.

Okay, it's true that I haven't read Radiance yet, so this question may fall somewhat outside the bounds of productive discussion about that book, but I do wonder what compelled you to delve back into the life of Mark Perdue. Was it something about the character himself, his particular dilemma, or did the advances in particle physics since the publication of Particles and Luck make the subject matter too tantalizing to leave alone? Or something else?!

For what it's worth, without this group and Julia Drake's email about it, I would not have known that Radiance was out, so thank you for having this discussion. I loved Particles and Luck and am looking forward to Radiance.

Particles and Luck was a rather metaphysical book, I thought; about the communication or non-communication of "matter" and "spirit." As is physics. In this case, I think in the lapse of fifteen years, I've been reaching new feelings about "consciousness" -- and so indeed has the field of physics. Hard-headed physicists are sounding more mystical and subjective as the years go on, when they're not strictly immersed in calculation and experiment. So I guess I wanted to see what that same personality -- Mark Perdue's -- would make of these new feelings. It's a bit of an "existentialist" book, now that I think of it -- like Sartre's "Nausea" even -- with its focus on darkness and its zen mistrust of human thought-burble. Mark isn't the young man he was; the Mark Purdue of twenty years ago had a certain swagger and egotism; he's a humbler man now, and feels he's lost his mojo. Nevertheless he's as irritable as ever.