Quantalore
Stories inspired by the quantum world
BOOKS
Age 11+
DEATH DOT
In a parallel present, where everyone is born with a black mole on their wrist that lightens the nearer they are to death, a 16-year-old girl finds there is more to life than simply knowing when you will die.
​
Ivy’s mortality mole, otherwise known as a “death dot”, is Black 6. Her best friend Charlotte’s is already Grey 2. Their anticipated progression through the ten shades of Black, Grey and White so far indicate an average lifespan. However, they don’t feel so lucky. Their shades might shift... the rate of change could increase... and they are teenagers. In their world, anyone young facing White—or worse, nearing White 10—is better off dead.
​
Until Ivy refuses the shame of White.
Young Adult
DREAMNESIA:
RETROSPECT
Blink. Breathe. Stand there, indecisive.
In a moment it might be hunger, fatigue, a chill or a yawn. Whatever the involuntary response they stimulate deep inside your head, you haven't the capacity to scrutinize it. Because you can't remember.
​
Don't worry. Most of us can't.
When Wilden finally follows his own intuition, he discovers a force that conceals its influence over humanity through the forgetting of dreams. It is then that he must face the consequences of his past.
Awake and asleep.
​
Paperbacks available through Amazon, Death Dot on Kindle.
Death Dot,Many Worlds Series:
Science Behind the Inspiration
Hugh Everett was an American Physicist who first proposed the many-worlds interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics, a theory from which Death Dot
has been inspired.
​
The many-worlds interpretation asserts that the reality we experience is but a single timeline amid an infinite number of others, which we cannot see. Countless versions of ourselves are therefore branching off in new alternate timelines, creating worlds in which every possibility of our existence plays out.
​
This mind-bending concept is derived from the fact that quantum particles exist in two states of excitement at the same time, behaving as both wave and particle. But their superposition disappears the instant we try to observe them, ending their wave activity, leaving us to see only their particle state. With our entire reality governed by this elusive behavior, the many-worlds interpretation explains that our observation of quantum objects entangles them within our existence and that the wave behavior they demonstrate
doesn't really cease, but carries on as a universal wave function
into alternate universes.
​
In Death Dot, Ivy's world can barely conceive an existence like ours, where death frequently comes unannounced. But her experiences dare her to see
another version of herself, another version of her universe.
This is just the first of many Ivy stories in a Many Worlds series set out
to explore her other timelines.
​
“
The conclusion, therefore, is that multiple worlds automatically occur in quantum mechanics. They are an inevitable part of the formalism. The only remaining question is: what are you going to do about it? There are three popular strategies on the market: anger, denial, and acceptance.
SEAN CARROLL, Cosmologist
As an analogy one can imagine an intelligent amoeba with a good memory. As time progresses the amoeba is constantly splitting, each time the resulting amoebas having the same memories as the parent. Our amoeba hence does not have a life line, but a life tree.
“
HUGH EVERETT,
Physicist
Dreamnesia Retrospect:
Science Behind the Inspiration
Memories, and how we perceive them over time, play a significant role in shaping our identity. They influence our desires, fears, impulses and ultimately reflect our individuality. But how much of our behavior is dictated by the memories we've stored up from learned experiences through our environment, and how much is simply dictated by the genetic programming we were born with, inherited from our parents?
​
At the forefront of this debate is neurobiologist Dr David Sweatt, whose pioneering work on epigenetics focuses on how we learn and store memories, and how our experiences trigger actual changes in the chemical structure of genes within our bodies—changes which can later be inherited by our offspring. The idea that some trauma your grandmother may have experienced in her youth, then passed onto your mother as a genetic memory... who then passed the same gene onto you, is not the stuff of science fiction. Our memories change us. Those same memories can change the generations after us. This is one of two areas of science knitted into the fabric of the Dreamnesia trilogy. The other, put simply, is that elusive nature of quantum particles.
Where the scientific community tries to address its gaps in understanding of these two sciences,
the fiction of setting, character and conflict flourish.
So there's about 800 million cytosines in your genome in the cells in your body and somehow it's clear that one specific cytosine out of the sequence can get picked out to be methylated and the associated gene silenced, for example. Nobody really has any idea how that happens. So that's a major question that there has to be an answer. The data are clear on its face. There is specificity of these types of mechanisms, but it's completely mysterious how that happens.
“
DR DAVID SWEATT, Neurobiologist
The main difficulty in popularizing quantum physics is that we do not really know how to make images of it in our world. In this sense it is really counterintuitive.
​
“
“
ALAIN ASPECT,
Physicist
Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.
ERWIN SCHRODINGER, Physicist
Author Note: The Dreamnesia Trilogy has been purposefully written out of order to maintain the integrity of character development—a character who begins to remember a past he had completely forgotten, a past which still has aspects of gaps yet to be addressed in the other two books.
The first published book of the trilogy is the middle (Vol 2).
Apr
17
Dreamnesia Trilogy
Approximate publication date. To find out what Dreamanesia is about, click on In the Works on the homepage menu above!
Dreamnesia
The Method
The last two books evolved, as writing does, through drafts. Most of my drafts have been chucked into the recycling bin, left in a drawer or archived, never to been read again. However, I published a first edition of Death Dot and Dreamnesia: Retrospect in a draft form. The works were complete, included additional themes, dialogue and plot detail, but these "extras" would later be deleted, saved for the next volume. While these first editions were available for those few months in their rough state,
I was open to criticism by anyone who might give it to me. It has been an invaluable process, though one I probably won't repeat.
(But Tret or Tare may change my mind.)
​
​
As for the sitting at the desk and poking the keys, essentials are undisturbed morning writes, a filled bird feeder in those moments of pondering beyond the window, and music. Music playing in the background generally is a distraction, but if a composition or track epitomizes the atmosphere in a sequence I'm working on, I will listen to it on repeat until I've finished
a satisfactory draft. Sometimes for weeks.
​
​
And finally, where do I get my ideas?
Science research. Mostly about the brain, memories and consciousness, and insight into human behaviour. Can't get enough of it.
And...
strangely,
(just as an aside)
an early morning shower is where every major plot idea has popped into my mind.
The shower screen is an excellent jotter.
Shawn worked in children's education for 15 years before publishing her first Young Adult Science Fiction novel Death Dot. However, her first written novel is Dreamnesia, the middle story in a trilogy, available in paperback and on kindle.
Originally from California, she received her BA in English from California State University, East Bay, studied and lived in the UK for 20 years.
For media enquiries, please contact: info@quantalore.com