A Life Full of Quarks - Softcover

Johnson, C W

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9798991428408

Publisher: Baryon Dreams Press, 2024

Synopsis

Winner! Kirkus Indie Award 2026 (SF/Fantasy) “Heartbreaking and hilarious”-- Kirkus Reviews (starred review); Kirkus top Indie books of 2025

“...the best self-published novel I have read this year…clever, sad and funny by turns – and, occasionally, all at once”-- Big Al’s Books and Pals

2025 BIBA winner fiction/non-genre

2024 Indies Today Best Literary Science Fiction

“a masterful work of absurdist fiction that is remarkably grounded in authentic emotion and real science”-- Self Publishing Review

The genre-crossing misadventures of a lonely boy genius.

Vengeful dinosaurs. A runaway alien. Deadly subatomic particles. Parents who don’t understand you.

John Chant had an unusual childhood, sprinkled with a venomous pet lizard, a robot brother, an omelet competition, an island of monstrous secrets, and a malevolent chimpanzee.

Exiled and on his own, he later negotiates graduate school, atomic secrets, and the challenges of death-rays. John is skilled at math and nuclear reactors, but he struggles with the universe’s most difficult puzzle: love.

“Thrillingly inventive novel of growing up the son of a mad scientist.” BookLife review

About this title

About the Author

As a child, C. W. Johnson lived in a world of his own, much to the exasperation of his family. He trained in theoretical physics, mathematics, computers, science fiction, poetry, and many other impractical topics. Today he is a professor of physics at a university best left anonymous. He has published more than a dozen short stories in professional science fiction magazines such as Analog, Asimov's, and others, as well as more than two dozen poems. This novel is largely an extension of his many obsessions.

From the Back Cover

"When I was young, I wanted to be a paleontologist...."

John Chant grew up swimming in a sea of science: his father an eccentric physics professor, his mother a former nuclear chemist, his older sister a pest and occasional Marxist, his 'brother' a robot, his pet a venomous lizard. In this darkly comic journey, positioned somewhere between science fiction, fabulation, and magical realism, John encounters dinosaurs, cosmic rays, alien astronauts, poets and atomic secrets, alcoholics and cancer victims, crackpots and Nobelists, brilliant, beguiling women, and an experimental chimpanzee. He goes to a circus, a nuclear lab, graduate school, an underground lair, and eventually a faculty position at a spectacularly dysfunctional university. Through it all John explores the fantastical mysteries of the universe, including the biggest mystery of all: love.

Edition details

• Publisher: Baryon Dreams Press
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 13: 9798991428408
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 346