What books are you reading?

It took 300 pages after the main character died for him to regain consciousness in a quantum computer.

This is from Goodreads: Dear Friends,

I've got a great idea for a new novel. I've decided to call it "Seveneves", which is a palindrome. In case you didn't know, a "palindrome" is a word, phrase, number, or other sequence of characters which reads the same backward or forward. Allowances may be made for adjustments to capital letters, punctuation, and word dividers. By the way, punctuation prior to the development of printing, was light and haphazard. William Caxton (1474), the first printer of books in English, used three punctuation marks: the stroke (/) for marking word groups, the colon ( for marking distinct syntactic pauses, and the period (.) for marking the ends of sentences and brief pauses.

Anyway, the idea for "Seveneves" came to me when I wondered to myself, "What would happen if the world were ending?" And what would be a more fantastic way to end the world than by having the moon explode (I will keep folks on tenterhooks---hooks used to fasten cloth on a drying frame or tenter--by not telling them why, just referring to the source of the explosion cryptically as "The Agent"), and break into several large pieces, that then break into smaller and smaller pieces, and eventual fall out of orbit towards Earth where they will rain down total destruction upon all living things on the surface of the Earth. The surface of the earth is known to geologists as the "crust", and the crust occupies less than 1% of Earth's volume. The oceanic crust of the sheet is different from its continental crust. The oceanic crust is 5 km (3 mi) to 10 km (6 mi) thick and is composed primarily of basalt, diabase, and gabbro, gabbro of course being a dark, coarse-grained plutonic rock of crystalline texture, consisting mainly of pyroxene, plagioclase feldspar, and often olivine.

And when the best thinkers on Earth deduce that they are going to be smashed to smithereens (always wondered where that word came from, perhaps from the Irish "smidiríní"), they team up and try to get a large group of humans off the Earth and colonized in space orbit around Earth in the two years they have before the great rain of particles reaches its most destructive phase. One of the main characters will be a thinly disguised Neil deGrasse Tyson, and I'll throw in a guy who is suspiciously similar to Elon Musk just to keep things fresh. Elon Musk, you'll remember, is a South African-born, Canadian-American business magnate, engineer, inventor and investor. He is the CEO and CTO of SpaceX, CEO and product architect of Tesla Motors, and chairman of SolarCity. Musk has also envisioned a conceptual high-speed transportation system known as the Hyperloop and has proposed a VTOL supersonic jet aircraft with electric fan propulsion. That whole area interests me greatly, by the way, and so I think I'm going to focus a lot on orbital mechanics when I get to the part where the survivors colonize space, because really, who cares about the billions of people that will end up fried to a crisp back on planet Earth? I mean, where is the drama in that when we've got bolide trajectory calculations and solar radiation calculations and theories about the feasibility of various throws and holds of Greco-Roman wrestling in zero-gravity? Of course, you know that Greco-Roman (US) or Graeco-Roman (UK) wrestling is a style of wrestling that is practiced worldwide. It was contested at the first modern Olympic Games in 1896 and has been included in every edition of the summer Olympics held since 1908. According to the International Federation of Associated Wrestling Styles (FILA), Greco-Roman wrestling is one of the six main forms of amateur competitive wrestling practised internationally today. The other five forms are Freestyle wrestling, Grappling/Submission wrestling, Beach wrestling, Pankration athlima, Alysh/Belt wrestling and Traditional/Folk wrestling.

Oh, and there will be a super big comet shard that comes into play, because they'll need the water from that shard to be heated and the steam used as propulsion to move the space station (and its adjoining linked spacecrafts containing the Earth's remaining population) into a higher orbit so that the survivors don't get pulled back into the Earth's gravity and have a chance at living off the planet for several thousand years until the Earth is ready to be repopulated. There will be plenty of super-detailed descriptions of all of this stuff for many hundreds of pages in the book, so don't worry if you've missed something or it's unclear. I believe it was Shakespeare who said brevity is the soul of wit, but I'm not going for wit with this book, I'm going for the antithesis of wit with this novel, so, if we think of brevity as A, and the soul of wit as B, then A=B, and of course, in propositional logic, transposition is a valid rule of replacement that permits one to switch the antecedent with the consequent of a conditional statement in a logical proof if they are also both negated. It is the inference from the truth of "A implies B" the truth of "Not-B implies not-A", and conversely. Furthermore, I'd propose that it is very closely related to the rule of inference "modus tollens". But I do throw in something kinda funny around page 786.

So finally, after I've invested all this time and effort into the incredibly detailed world-building, and tossed in a huge number of thinly sketched "characters" to help make the incredibly ornate (some might say "rococo" (/rəˈkoʊkoʊ/ or /roʊkəˈkoʊ/), less commonly roccoco, or "Late Baroque", you know, the 18th-century artistic movement and style, affecting many aspects of the arts including painting, sculpture, architecture, interior design, decoration, literature, music, and theatre, that developed in the early 18th century in Paris, France as a reaction against the grandeur, symmetry, and strict regulations of the Baroque, especially of the Palace of Versailles. Rococo artists and architects used a more jocular, florid, and graceful approach to the Baroque) accumulation of facts and descriptions more digestible and relatable to someone who is not either a post-doctoral MIT graduate or an individual somewhere on the autism spectrum, I'm gonna throw a curve at the reader by starting the third section of the book with "Five Thousand Years Later". I can just imagine my readers hugging themselves with delight at this audacious leap forward.

I don't want to go into detail about the final third of the book, so let's just say that it will provide users with a complicated description of the architectural engineering involved in housing 3 billion people in space, as well as the anthropological, genetic and cultural ramifications of humans living in space for thousands of years, all while keeping the interior lives of these people at a far remove, so that my readers don't get bogged down in all that interpersonal and emotional complexity.

If I can just say in closing, "heterozygosity" is super-important to the themes I'm trying to grapple with in what I consider to be a fairly streamlined and gripping, fast-paced thriller. Remember, a diploid organism is heterozygous at a gene locus when its cells contain two different alleles of a gene. The cell or organism is called a heterozygote specifically for the allele in question, therefore, heterozygosity refers to a specific genotype.

I should have the first draft of this book ready for your perusal sometime in the next few years or so, so please book me into a meeting with the art department sometime around then. I look forward to working with you to make this next book a huge success.

Your truly,
Neal

P.S. I cannot stress enough the importance of "heterozygosity" to the narrative.
P.S.S. Oh, and "bolides". Look it up. (less)