I write novels about science. But to qualify that, the books include science fiction, science speculation, futuristic technology, and other agendas that expand the identity of science. My goal is to provide great adventure, and a relationship with science that will inspire the reader to challenge and question the truth. This search amplifies when science becomes repressive and self important, when it demonizes our every doubt and suspicion, and when it becomes the only actor on stage.

     Science grabbed my attention a long time ago. As a boy of five or six, I can recall being troubled by the fact that people lived on the earth’s surface, and not inside the earth. How could that be? Why were folks not falling off the earth like water dripping from a spinning tennis ball? This was the beginning of a quest for truth, and a trust in science. I gave my heart to science, but not my soul. There was room for inquisition and reservation, and I always had my doubts that something was missing.

     Kingdom of the Blue Diamond questions the paradigm that the origin of life on earth was nothing more than a random, chemically induced event, and that human evolution followed a similar path of accidental consequence. The story marches out of the back end with an astounding deduction about the origins of life in the universe.

    Hidden in the plot of Forbidden Summit is a reference to the principles of the ancient Greek philosophy of Gaia. This conviction assigns a balance of existence to all living things and the environment that it is sustained by. Even today, there is growing recognition that consciousness may be a force that pervades the universe, like gravity or electromagnetism.  

    I’m a list guy. Top ten. Today, it almost seems to be a cultural obligation. Get your mind in order and your facts straight. OK fine. Among my favorite days include the birth of my son, a total solar eclipse viewed with my wife at Maryhill Stonehenge in 1979, a day at Machu Picchu with my cousin and my Bolivian buddy Pablo, climbing Mt. Langley with my daughter and meeting a herd of rare Bighorn ship at the summit, attending my first major league baseball game with my father at Candlestick Park in 1962. I believe that simple, innocent events define who we are, and build the best days of our lives.

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Like most novels, Kingdom of the Blue Diamond was inspired by personal experience, emotional curiosity, and a search for truth. While I was a University student of earth science, geology, chemistry and biology (long ago), I became fascinated with theories about the origins of life on earth. I read everything I could get my hands on regarding the topic, and there wasn’t a lot out there. Just a couple of ideas seemed to grab the attention of anybody who was listening.

In the early 20th century, a Russian biochemist pitched a theory that life somehow had launched out of an ancient sea, emerging first as simple organic cells that eventually evolved into complex living organisms. Later, in the 1950’s, a couple of over achieving organic chemists discovered that they could produce amino acids in a flask filled with pre-biotic atmospheric gases after introducing an electric charge. The Urey-Miller experiment caught fire and grabbed the lion’s share of the debate; amino acids would use natural selection and random mutation to form proteins, the very stuff of life. These earlier attempts to explain the origins of life were eventually sent packing, denied by new discoveries that these theories were lacking the necessary chemistry and physics to make life happen.

No matter what theory surfaced, I was disturbed by the complete dismissal of a direction, schematic, plan or engineered source at play in the origins of life. Who was driving the ship? How could a mindless collection of organic chemicals powered by simple physics and the chemistry of molecular attraction and repulsion find a pathway to the creation of cognition and consciousness? In other words, how could a mindless universe determine that he universe was mindless?

I questioned my professors. How could the formation of complex life follow a path of evolution that was entirely random and accidental? They grew agitated. I got yelled at. Academia was demanding a full adoption of the agenda of random mutation, natural selection and evolution without a hint of a direction, plan, grid, schematic or even a trace of an idea borne of some manner of intelligence, then, now, or ever to be. No questions asked. Later, I could see others cross-examine the agenda, other professionals wagging a finger at Darwin. Some were dismissed from their careers, never to surface again. In America, you can publicly denigrate the President, scorch religion at will, dismiss cultural traditions, social agendas and family structure, all without fear of reprisal. But don’t question Darwin. That will get you fired.

Kingdom of the Blue Diamond questions the 170 year old paradigm of the mechanics of evolution. It asks how random changes and a bunch of chemicals can march through millenia and manufacture complex life. And all of it accomplished by wind and rain, dirt and rock, sunlight and nightfall, without a trace of intention, directive, or even an idea to be found anywhere in the scheme. Hmm…

I was careful in Kingdom of the Blue Diamond not to introduce the concept of God at work in the creation of life. Intelligent Design, I believe, functions just fine without God or Allah, Buddha, or any saintly figure. In my book (no pun intended) all that is needed to kickstart life on earth is some manner of intelligence in the universe that is smarter than us.

Not everyone reading Kingdom would likely have the same passion for the origins of life on earth as I. So, I attempted to introduce compelling subplots with driven and disturbed characters around the concept. One of the protagonists walks the conflicted path of a professional questioning the very concept that he teaches. Most writers, I believe, insert themselves into their plot, disguised as some main character, sneaking around in their own alter ego. For me, this is Tom Angelo, who is committed to his beliefs that are contrary to his professional agenda. He struggles to find the courage to trust the implications of what he sees as truth, and to adopt an unpopular and publicly unsupported cause. He eventually wins the battle, but not before paying a substantial price.

Another profound protagonist enters the story early, and I dare to assign such an identity to a molecule. RNA has become a familiar character now to everybody on earth after its important role as both a viral carrier and a vaccinating agent in the Covid wars. But RNA has also become the main character in the search for the origins of life on earth. Did this step sister of DNA emerge somehow as the forerunner of the chemical kick-start of life?

What compels the other characters in the book to work ferociously towards their own personal agendas? Why is Salvador Ruiz chosen to discover the fossil meteorite? Why were Pasquale Cortano, Frank Hamment, Randle Cowens and Greg Shepherd selected as characters to develop and move the storyline? Why was a Trilobite used as the fossil of choice to demonstrate a universal origin of life in the universe? An upcoming post examines these questions, and others, as well as taking a look at the most current research available on the search for the origins of life on earth. This includes a look at spiritual concepts that are tied to science, exposing a reality that it is not necessary to abandon one to adopt the other.