The Trinity Paradox

Afterword THE TRINITY PARADOX ORIGINS Doug Beason

I think it was Kevin who came up with the idea of writing an alternate history of the Manhattan project. And it all seemed natural at the time, the thing everyone expected us to do. After all, we’d met back in ’85 at a nuclear weapons laboratory, and we’d both had experience at Los Alamos National Laboratory—birthplace of the atomic bomb—and we’d both been out to the Nevada Nuclear Test Site: Kevin as a technical writer, and myself as a researcher.

Writing Trinity was not only personally and professionally interesting for us, but it made extensive use of our training and education. In fact this had become somewhat of a trademark for us: we both knew and understood our writing because we were not only active in the field, but we were publishing and making technical advances in it as well. This became an attribute of our collaborations: inserting real life experience and knowledge into our work. Other projects, such as our short story “Reflections in a Magnetic Mirror,” and novels such as Ill Wind, Ignition, Lifeline, the Nebula-nominated Assemblers of Infinity, and the Craig Kreident SF-mystery series (Virtual Destruction, Fallout, and Lethal Exposure), all made use of our scientific backgrounds.

What made writing Trinity even more exhilarating was that Kevin was a fanatic for historical detail, and as a computational physicist, I was fascinated by the science pioneered at war-time Los Alamos. I had performed my PhD thesis on the Los Alamos supercomputers, and Kevin had orchestrated some complex technical publications at the lab, as well as spent weekends touring the once highly secretive complex, and hiking throughout Bandelier National Park and the Anasazi ruins.

Writing Trinity started as a typical brainstorming session for us. We were eating either pizza or grilling steaks—a great way to fuel the creative juices—and whoever wasn’t cooking was taking notes. The concept grew into about five pages when we decided to start chopping it up logically and laying out the different plot lines.

The idea was that an extremely bright, and blindingly passionate female anti-nuclear protestor would somehow be transported back to the origins of the Manhattan project, in the middle of wartime America. This allowed us to explore the question of whether her foreknowledge of history would change the outcome of inventing the bomb… or WWII? And would her views change when she was suddenly immersed in this frantic, all-out effort to save 1940s America?

Writing the novel was one of the most fun collaborative experiences I’ve had. For example, one morning we wrote synopsis of major scenes onto sheets of paper. That afternoon (after a hike up the Sandia mountains in Albuquerque) Kevin and I laid the paper all over my living room floor, rearranging them while we mapped out the plot. My wife kept our toddlers out of the way while Kevin and I unscrambled plot lines, added and subtracted chapters, and finally achieved a holistic, visual view of the novel.

The story naturally divided itself along two lines: the German nuclear effort, and the US/UK Los Alamos secret program to produce the “device” (what the atomic bomb was called at the time).

Kevin and I divided the writing duties equitably. “You take that character and I’ll take this one.” Or, “I’ll write this chapter if you want to write the next one.” After the first draft was finished, whoever wanted to take the first cut at re-writing the entire novel had carte-blanche to change anything he wanted—words, sentences, scenes, structure, plot, whatever. And that, I think, was the strength of our collaboration. It was like taking our own work (but yet weirdly different because we had not written all of it) and rewriting it as our own. It took awhile to get into this mode of editing, but that gave the novel a single voice, and gave us the freedom to produce something that was much greater than simply slapping two pieces of disparate text together.

For this collaboration, the process of figuring out “who wrote what” fell naturally along our areas of interest. Kevin may not have literally jumped up and shouted that he wanted to write the German part of the novel, but he did everything but that. And I assume that I did the same for writing the US part. One anecdote I fondly remember was about the innovative way that we fictionally killed off Edward Teller, father of the H-Bomb. I actually truly admired Dr. Teller, and years later, he nodded his head in amusement when I told him I’d committed literary homicide in Kevin and my critically acclaimed book.

The Trinity Paradox was a culmination of our diverse experiences, a fusion of mutual interests. At the time we wrote the novel, it had been fifty years since the Manhattan project had occurred when we wrote Trinity in 1991, and that monumental event was quickly fading from memory. By contrast today, the Beatles first appeared on the international scene some fifty years ago, and look at how many people are still swept up by that creative explosion… equivalent in cultural change, if not in energetic force, to the impact made by wartime Los Alamos. We just wanted to ensure that perspective was not forgotten.