The genre means something specific to me. Not science fiction decorated with literary prose, and not literary fiction that happens to involve physics. Something at the intersection — a place where the rigour of hard science and the rigour of literary character work are both fully present, neither subordinated to the other.
I came to this intersection from the science side. I spent years reading physics — not popular science, but actual physics, the kind with equations and peer review and the specific quality of precision that comes from a discipline that has been refining its methods for four centuries. I read quantum field theory and cosmology and the published literature on the observer problem and the hard problem of consciousness. I read it because I found it genuinely interesting, not because I was looking for story material.
The story material found me.
The questions that serious physics opens — what is the relationship between the observer and the observed? what is the substrate of space? what does it mean that the act of measurement changes what is measured? — are not questions that physics was designed to answer. They are questions that physics keeps arriving at and then, professionally, setting aside. The discipline has learned to do extraordinary work while bracketing the questions that its methods cannot address.
Literary fiction is, among other things, a method for addressing questions that other methods cannot address. It works through character and consequence and the specific texture of lived experience. It is not a substitute for science. It is a different kind of knowing.
What I am trying to do — what I think literary science fiction at its best does — is hold both kinds of knowing simultaneously. The physics is real. The character is real. The question is real. The novel is the space in which all three can be present at once.
That is why I write it. Because the questions are real, and the novel is the form that can hold them.