Synopsis

A brilliant young Los Alamos physicist with acute amnesia meets a provocative young woman on the run from her husband. She's self-described "trailer trash" seeking Buddhist wisdom; he just wants to learn what happened to the first 23 years of his life. They meet by "accident," but in their complementary worlds of science and belief there's no allowance for coincidence. Something larger is at work, linking their lives, propelling them on a wild quest of self-discovery.

Author's Notes

I wrote String Theories in 1997-1998 while living in Taos. I wanted to attempt something fairly outrageous that could flirt with credibility, blending physics with Buddhism and New Age concepts. There's plenty of both in the novel, but it's first and foremost an adventure story. My physicist hero, Reese Archuleta, needs to unravel the mystery of his missing twenty-three years: how is it he could awake in a ditch inside the Los Alamos National Laboratory compound (completely fenced in and well-guarded) with no memory of who he is or how he got there, and no one else at Los Alamos who's ever seen him before? My lead female character, Dahlia "Sage" Stipes, an eager Bodhisattva and mystic fresh out of a single-wide trailer near Wichita, needs to figure out why she "accidentally" bumped into Reese and why it is he looks so familiar to her. She also needs to steer clear of her obsessive and dim-witted husband who will try nearly anything to get her back.

String Theories was represented for a while by Nicholas Ellison, Inc. in New York, now part of Sanford J. Greenburger Associates. It had a series of "almosts" at several houses; the closest call was at Houghton Mifflin, where it had a strong champion but ultimately didn't get a majority vote from the ed board. Afterwards, I reworked some of it, and even renamed it... but the book now on Smashwords and Scribd is the original version, and I believe, the best.