Exclusive Author Interview Part 1

Katie Westbrook of Soft Cover Review interviewed the author days after the release of his mystery thriller The Outermost.

Scott, we here at Soft Cover Review are so exited about your debut novel, The Outermost. Its been likened to George Orwell’s 1984, to CS Lewis’s Narnia series and Carl Sagan’s Contact. Clue our readers in. Tell us what this is all about.

Two childhood friends become connected again after nearly forty years. One of them, Tom, is a Harvard professor who is caught up in a top secret government assignment. The other, Robby, is following in his father’s footsteps serving the poor on a remote island in the South Pacific. In a matter of days, the CIA is hot on their tail with consequences that will effect a lot more than Tidal Island and its people.

The novel opens with President Kennedy. How does he tie in with this story of friendship?

(chuckles) Well, by the time the novel gets going, Tom and Robby are no longer friends.

Kennedy, perhaps America’s most iconic president, purchased the first Green Box from Egypt where it was discovered in the 1960s during the great Space Race. The Green Boxes contained data from the yet to be discovered exoplanet Neplar, but there was enough data at that time that men who had access to top secret files believed in the possibility of life on other planets. As a kid, I remember my grandmother’s Time magazines. I read about the Space Race. Kennedy, the astronauts- they were heroes.

You didn’t find it difficult then to incorporate aliens into a mystery thriller?

I wanted to take aliens out of the “green creatures of evil intent” script that Hollywood has written for them. That’s why it was important to place an historical figure like Kennedy in the mix. If life on other planets do exist, what if they are much like us, searching, hoping, looking for meaning, light, in a universe of darkness.

So you wrote the story of Neplar. Tell us more about Neplar.

Neplar was discovered by the Keplar Space telescope. The Green Boxes that Tom decoded revealed a society far more advanced than our own. They had self-driving cars on a grid. Think of calling Uber. But the people of Neplar just spoke into their bot, which is a computer chip imbedded in their wrist, and a car appeared and they were on their way. Think of Facetime. But there is no hardware. No phones. No computer screens. The image of the person you Facetime simply appears as a hologram before you. They have a race of people, the Argents, that are simply AI, robots so to say, but they are so real they are considered a race of people. Think of where we are going with technology. I just fast-forwarded Earth into the future with things already being developed.

Did you mean to address the deeper questions of life in your first novel?

Not really. There was just a story to be told. And as the book progressed, I began telling more of it.

The plates do have a God-like feel to them. Is that intentional?

My faith certainly played into my writing. You had mentioned Narnia. Phathos would be an Aslan-like character.

I am really excited to recommend The Outermost to our following. Is there more to come?

Every human story is a story of great depth. I think the people of Tidal Island have more to say. Like the first plate reveals, “Phathos, who can make a million souls with a single breath, will give each soul a million spiritual galaxies. They will see the vastness of the universe, millions of galaxies and think unfathomable. Then they will know how spacious he has made each of their souls.”