Last week I reviewed author Martin Chatterton’s latest The Brain Full of Holes.  I so enjoyed Martin’s last visit I felt honored that he wanted to come back and share more with my readers.  Please join me in once again welcoming Martin to Galleysmith.

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Martin Chatterton ‘Terra Incognita’.

This is the latest stop on my whirlwind global blog tour. I’m still adjusting to the blogosphere, so please bear with me while I decompress. I’m here to spread the word about my glorious new book of total gibberish, ‘The Brain Full of Holes’, which is available from all good outlets, as well as a large number of quite frankly lousy ones.

‘TBFOH’ is the second installment in the adventures of Theo Brain (aged 13), the self-styled ‘World’s Greatest Detective’ and his trusty sidekick, Sheldon McGlone. While the first book (‘The Brain Finds A Leg’) saw the duo battling Australian corporate eco-polluters, killer koalas and deranged hippies, TBFOH sees them entering the murky world of particle physics centered around the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.

Particle physics, on the face of it, wouldn’t appear to be promising material for writing a YA book. No-one understands the subject, not even – so far as I can tell – those who have made it their life work to study the subject. Its difficult, dense, dark stuff.

Which is why I think it’s perfect. Since no-one really knows what happens when you smash particles into each other at high speed, this gives the writer (me) the excuse to invent a completely new set of loopy situations. I’m particularly fond of the carnivorous cuckoo-clocks.

While the subject matter gives me carte blanche to explore the surreal, I think its important to retain at least a thin thread of plausibility. If I simply wrote nonsense, with no basis in reality, the situations would simply become whimsical. I don’t for a moment believe that any of the odder events I describe in TBFOH would happen, but there is a tiny speck of possibility in there somewhere. Example: almost all of what we think of as ‘solid’ objects consists of empty space. Or, at least, what we think might be empty space. The actual, observable physical matter contained in an atom – which constitutes the component parts of everything in the universe – is tiny. Some scientists believe there must be something else in there that we can’t yet measure, or see. And its that little nugget of information that gives me the opportunity to riff on the possibilities, unlikely though they may be, of exactly what else might be in there.

Or out there.

Science, when talking about the observable universe, freely admits that almost everything ‘out there’ is unknown. Things happen in space, and at the sub-microscopic level that we just don’t understand, or that we are simply not aware of. We are at the stage that ancient mariners were at when they scrawled ‘terra incognita’ across their maps when faced with the unknown. Often these maps were decorated with fanciful images of what the sailors imagined might be out there. This, essentially, is what I do.

Terra Incognita. My favourite place.

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Thank you for stopping by to visit again.  Sheldon and The Brain are definitely two characters I’ve enjoyed reading and hope to see more of in the future.