Fact or Fiction or What?

Working on an early chapter (the fifth or sixth draft) of Oikos Gnosis, my next book, I came up against a boulder in the road and I knew I would have to talk to somebody who had been there in person and would be willing to talk about it on the record.

The chapter takes place in 1979. It's about a university professor of mathematics -- advanced -- with a famous last name -- Mendelssohn -- Rebecca Mendelssohn -- who gets “visited” by an agent from an agency within the Byzantine national defense intelligence network.

The network, she’s told, is “concerned” about an academic paper she had recently submitted for publication to an international peer reviewed journal.

The network, she's told, is concerned about “our enemies” and how they might benefit from her ideas, making them stronger and more difficult to defeat. She calls them morphogenic ideas.

The network wants her to remove some of these ideas from her paper, explaining that some ideas are “classified" and that their dissemination has consequences.

Her paper is about an early 19^th century German mathematician who said that thoughts have mass and how he’d been influenced by 18^th century German mathematicians who’d been freed to intersect parallel lines and how they’d been influenced by the 17^th century ideas of Leibniz, who said there’s no such thing as empty space.

Of course, in the chapter, Rebecca refuses to cooperate. That’s just the way she is… feisty… strong willed… a Jewish girl from New York who’d grown up in an Orthodox family but had jumped the Fence around the Torah when told she had to believe the unbelievable. Now, asked to keep quiet about what she’d proven to be mathematically correct, she decides to become a whistleblower, to go public, take her story to the press. She believes the people have a right to know that we're not running out; that there exists within reach a golden key to Emerald City where there’s enough for everybody and everybody has enough. She'd proven it. But a few, for personal reasons, want to keep it a secret? Outrageous!

I’m making all this stuff up, right? It’s a novel. You get to make stuff up in a novel, but only the story, not the science, not history, unless you write fantasy, which I don’t want to do.

Rewriting the chapter about Rebecca for the umpteenth time, I realized that I had to know and finally decide if it's realistic, or fantasy.

I know somebody who would know something about the answer -- Dr. Stephen O. Dean. He has a Ph.D. in physics.

Our paths first crossed in 1979. I was a newspaper reporter in Detroit. Dr. Dean was with the fusion energy division of the Department of Energy in Washington, D.C.

We’ve kept in touch over the years. He sent me a signed copy of his book along with a nice message.

I think I’ll give him a call. It’s not like the old days when long distance calls were expensive and you had to get the national desk editor’s permission to make one.