Author's Note

Dante's Equation was inspired, around 1999, by a course I was taking in Eastern Religions and an audio tape series I was listening to from The Teaching Company called "Great Minds of the Intellectual Western Tradition."  Before I'm accused of being intellectual, let me just make it clear that my interest in religion and philosophy, while occasionally prompting me to material like this, just as often leads to me to drown in Buffy and X-Files DVDs, Dan Brown and Stephen King.

In any event, I was on a plane reading an Introduction to Buddhism and there was a long Buddhist poem which went a little something like this:  "Why should you desire women when you know that one day they will be rotting carcasses filled with worms and putrid stench?  And why should you desire to eat rich foods when you know that your gut will turn them into stinking bile?  Why have friends when you know that everyone is only out for himself in the end and that, in any case, they will one day die." and so on, listing item after item and what was awful about it.

I found myself pretty disgusted by this philosophy and thought that, sure, ok, yeah, the poem was true enough -- the things it listed had these negative aspects.  But they had just as many good things, too, and by rejecting them in order to avoid their 'bad side' you deprived yourself of the 'good side' as well.  It was then that an idea was born and progressed over the course of the plane ride.  The idea was that maybe everything, every single object, event and person in our world, was an exact balance of good and bad -- 50/50.  That perhaps it was even a physical law.  It was kind of like symmetry in physics -- for every particle there is an antiparticle.  There are millions of opposites  -- male/female, birth/death, day/night.  What if that idea extended to objects as well, and people and even events?

I began listing things, trying to break my new theory (there is a section in Book 2 where Nate and Jill have this very discussion).  I listed plane rides, modern medicine, having children, and on and on.  And, yes, I could (if somewhat subjectively) list just as many positives as negatives for every singe thing.  In fact, the bigger the positives the bigger the 'shit factor', as Nate points out.

Thus was Dante's Equation born.

This book began as a 'big idea,' actually an entire cosmology.  Putting these ideas into novel form, however, was the biggest challenge I have ever faced.   I spent months reading physics and kabbalah (ninth grade biology was the most science I ever had in school).   There was such a detailed wealth of information that it took me forever just to filter what was really important for the book.   There were also real structural challenges.  The story takes place partially on Earth and partially on other worlds.  Add four main characters into the mix and I was essentially writing eight different, but interconnected, storylines.   In these, and other ways, this project was nearly too big for me.  Heck, maybe it was too big for me.  It certainly felt that way at times.  I had help, though.  My editor, Shelly Shapiro, guided me through two massive rewrites.

So what is Dante's Equation about?  It is about the big questions -- Why do bad things happen?   What kind of a world is this anyway?  What happens when we die?  How and why are we judged?  What is the meaning of it all?  

We all try to answer those questions every day, consciously or unconsciously.  This is my take on the subject.