I reviewed Ransom Stephens’ first book, The God Patent in August 2009. Originally published as an ebook at Scribd (www.TheGodPatent.com), The God Patent is one of those rare books to make the crossover from online to traditional publishing. A paperback version was published in late 2009 by Numina Press in San Rafael. Ransom Stephens has had a remarkable career as a professor of physics, high tech consultant, public speaker and author – all this while raising a daughter as a single parent. Yesterday we sat down at Peet’s Coffee in Petaluma to discuss his book. He has a wonderfully disarming sense of humor and a mind as quick as a pickpocket working on a quota system. 

__

What motivated you to write The God Patent?

What happened with this book was that there was an underlying idea. In this case, it’s the model of the soul. And then the characters come alive. And then the plot. The overarching plot of the patents came from working in high tech and milking the machine for patent bonuses. And from that I got to thinking, “What’s the craziest thing you could patent?” The origin of the universe and the soul are the two craziest things you could patent.

How long did it take you to write it?

The first draft took four months and the second draft took six months, writing one to three hours a day over that period. And then each draft after that took three months, and there were two. So about sixteen months.

In your life, there is a connection between your work in the high tech field and writing. What’s the difference between them?

The biggest difference is that I’ve found that I can’t write fiction when I’m in any way annoyed. If I check my email first and have a customer that’s bothering me, I can’t get into a character’s head. So I have to do it first before I do anything else. I can do the high tech stuff in any state of mind.

You weave the story of a broken family into your novel.

I wanted to write the teenager [Katarina – daughter of the main character, Ryan] as fast as I could because I knew it would go away. I don’t think I could do it now. They get better in every revision. Some of them were really good right out of the gate. Ryan was pretty much himself. Dodge was my favorite character.

Ryan was a pretty despicable guy at first.

You think so? I know you said that but I didn’t really feel like that. He’s a fuck up. He made bad decisions. He made mistakes.

But you took an anti-hero and made him into a hero.

I wanted a really clear mark of growth, right? And so the way I tried to deal with the fact that he made bad decisions – and for that reason I guess you can call him “despicable,” at least in the beginning – so to manage that, I didn’t tell you what he’d done until well into the book. How he screwed up his life. Back stories are usually boring anyway. If you put it at the beginning you have a big chance of losing your audience. But if you hint at it until you build up some desire in the reader to say, “Come on tell me what happened,” and then you give it to them.

Where did you learn to write?

Mostly from the San Francisco Writer’s Workshop. I started going in 2005, and I went religiously for two years. Now I go about once a month. It’s the longest running workshop in the country. Since 1947. That’s where Khaled Hosseini wrote his first book, The Kite Runner.

What other sort of writing have you done?

I’ve written personal essays such as how to talk to your teenagers about drugs. That one was published in a handful of regional parenting magazines. Most of my bills are paid by writing papers for high tech companies.

Are you working on another book?

Yes, but it’s still a year away from completion. It’s called The Sensory Deception. It’s about a zoologist, a biochemist, a venture capitalist and a computer scientist who are environmentalists, and who come up with a design for a virtual reality that recruits environmentalists. People who go in come out environmentalists.

What was it like going from being published online at Scribd to being published in paperback?

I talked to my agent last year about Scribd. I asked her what she thought and she said that anything you can do to show that the book is marketable is good. As you know, it did well. Once it did well at Scribd – it spent thirteen weeks there on its top ten most read fiction list – there was a publisher, Numina Press, who was aware of this. They have a different model for publishing than established players in New York City. Instead of having interns read books and judging the quality, they let the market do it. If the book does well as an e-novel, they want to get it because it’s already proven itself. It seems more democratic to me.

Are you doing any public readings?

Yeah, I’m doing readings. I’m giving a lot of talks. I’m booked kind of silly. I love giving speeches. That’s part of my income stream. The high tech stuff. Last week I spoke at DesignCon, the design engineering conference in San Jose.

What are the readings like?

People seem to really like this book. It’s really gratifying. It’s better than I expected it to be. So far! The publisher keeps telling me, “Just wait. They’re going to come after you.” I’m willing to wait. I’m giving a talk at the Institute of Noetic Science [101 San Antonio Rd., Petaluma] on February 23 at 7:00pm. The title of the talk is “The Concept of the Soul from The God Patent.”

What is the concept of the soul in The God Patent?

At the end of the book, there’s this model of the soul that is based on what they call the “clone paradox.” If you take a person and you clone them, and then accelerate their growth and map their brain so you have two identical people – then if you destroy the original, is he really dead? We can’t tell. No one can tell except the murderer. Not even the person, right? The clone will think he’s the real one. So there are a couple of questions. Is he really dead? Does he have a soul? It’s built around that . . . The idea is that it boils down to one well-defined question about the two clones: “Do you think the person died or not?” If you think that they didn’t – that the clone is actually the original person and that there’s no difference – then you can believe this model of the soul. If not, you can’t. In the book Ryan believes it, Emmy doesn’t, and Katarina does.

What writers have influenced you?

Nick Hornby, Neal Stephenson, Dave Eggers and Michael Chabon. I find that reading Michael Chabon gives me permission to do things I might not otherwise do. I want things to move fast. Because of that sometimes I will neglect describing things well enough so that you can see them. And so I have to pace myself a little bit, slow myself down so I can have a really thick textured story. Michael Chabon does such a brilliant job with description just by stopping and actually looking at something.

When a reader finishes your book, what do you want them to take away from the experience?

When I read a book I like feeling that I’ve really been through it with this guy, with the main characters. That’s why this book covers three years. I needed time to pass. That was the hardest part of this book. Making the time pass without the plot slowing down. But I also want to tickle you with some science. My contract with the reader is that there will be science and it will be accurate. Hopefully it will have a good gee whiz factor. And I want there to be enough narrative tension so if you’re not interested in the science that it’s okay.