This is a republishing of the Metaphysics of Physics podcast interview with Warren Fahy, author of the books Fragment and Pandemonium. We are going to talk about these books as well as about some biology stuff. This is the version that is hopefully free of spoilers. If you do not care about spoilers, use this other version. If you do, you might want to read the books first!
For those unaware, the Metaphysics of Physics was the previous incarnation of this site and for a time in included a podcast.
You can read the transcript or use the audio player below to listen to the interview. Or do both if you prefer!
Click here to download the episode.
Introduction
Today we have an interview with Warren Fahy, author of the books Fragment and Pandemonium. We are going to talk about these books as well as about some biology stuff. Should be fun!
Some of you may not know what these books are. Well, Warren is going to tell us all about them in a little bit. But they are science thrillers something along the lines of Jurassic Park.
You can probably gather by the fact that I am interviewing him about these books, that I have read them and probably enjoy them.
Yes, I have read them and I do enjoy them. Fragment and the sequel are amazingly interesting books with some extremely compelling biological theories.
There are some truly terrifying, nightmare creatures in both of them. They make the dinosaurs and monsters in other books seem tame. Dragons? T-Rexes? The critters in these books, such as spigers are much deadlier and scarier.
I also quite like the main cast of characters, but I cannot talk about that very much without spoilers. But two of them are biologists and they may or may not have some fascinating biological ideas, new and old.
Highly recommended. But more than that and as entertaining as the scary monsters are, you might also learn something reading this.
This is the non-spoiler version of this episode. If you have read these books, you might want to go to the other version of the podcast here. It has a lot of the same stuff, but without spoiler content removed.
Please note that we cannot be 100% sure that there is not some spoiler we missed in here. It might be best to read the books before listening to this podcast!
Episode Transcript
We have not presented the transcript of this in web page form. Instead, you can listen to the audio or download the PDF transcript.
However, there may be mistakes in the transcript. Any mistakes in transcription represent our own errors or a transcription error we missed.
Click here to download the PDF transcript.
Brief Excerpt
Dwayne: Hello, welcome to episode twenty-five of the Metaphysics of Physics podcast.
I am Dwayne Davies, your occasional host. Today we are going to interview Warren Fahy, the author of the bestselling books Fragment and Pandemonium.
Some of you may not know what these books are. Well, Warren is going to tell us all about them in a little bit. But they are science thrillers something along the lines of Jurassic Park.
You can probably gather by the fact that I am interviewing him about these books, that I have read them and probably enjoy them. Yes, I have read them and I do enjoy them.
Fragment and the sequel are amazingly interesting books with some extremely compelling biological theories.
There are some truly terrifying, nightmare creatures in both of them. They make the dinosaurs and monsters in other books seem tame. Dragons? T-Rexes? The critters in these books, such as spigers are
much deadlier and scarier.
I also quite like the main cast of characters, but I cannot talk about that very much without spoilers. But two of them are biologists and they may or may not have some fascinating biological ideas, new and old.
Highly recommended. But more than that and as entertaining as the scary monsters are, you might also learn something reading this.
All right, now we have that out of the way, let’s get back into things.
Alright, thank you for being here Warren.
Give us a brief introduction to Fragment and Pandemonium. Later questions will focus more on the science and the like, so maybe, for now, focus more on the theme and the plots.
Warren: Perfect. Well, Fragment and Pandemonium are science thrillers. They are somewhat in the vein of Michael Crichton books, which happened to be my favorite kind of thriller.
I like to read a thriller, get something out of it, get some new information and to learn something. So that was the kind of book I decided I wanted to write.Since I was a kid, I’ve been writing.
And I have been studying evolution ever since I dug a fossil out of the hills behind my grandparent’s home when I was eight. Ever since then I’ve been fascinated by evolution. And so, I decided to mine that avenue for a thriller.
I hadn’t really seen anyone ever deal with the concept of a completely separate evolution that was isolated and went off in a completely different direction. Resulting in an entire ecosystem of almost alien creatures. If you went back far enough, I figured you could make a very compelling world.
And so, Fragment is a story of a fragment of an ancient super-continent that had been isolated for 550 million years. And which was lost in the middle of the South Pacific Ocean in the middle of the Roaring Forties. Which is a current that ships try to avoid in their shipping routes.
I decided to put a reality TV show that is circumnavigating the world, in the path of this island. And what they discover, of course, is an alien world. Such a dangerous world that they’re almost all slaughtered on live television as they land.
And this calls attention to the United States government. The Navy isolates the island and sends in a team of scientists to find out what in the world is going on.
And what they discover is a world that if any of the species from it were to escape, and get to the rest of the world, it would be only a matter of time before they knocked out the legs from every single ecosystem on planet Earth. And so, that’s the premise of Fragment.
Pandemonium is the sequel. It has some of the survivors moving on to yet another ecosystem that has been isolated in a giant cave system under the Ural Mountains in a fictitious country.
And within that cave system, the former Soviet Union has built a gigantic city from which to escape any possible pandemonium from any kind of worldwide nuclear conflagration.
And so, then we discover an entirely different universe of creatures. We discover an ecosystem that descended not Cambrian era like Fragment but descended from the Devonian.
One in which the ecosystem is chiefly mostly molluscs instead of arthropods, like the Cambrian era descendants. And so, we once again we have another entire menu of crazy monster animals to deal with.So those are the two science-heavy books and they incorporate a lot of different new theories and required a lot of interesting research.
Dwayne: Well, that fossil you dug up when you were eight, did you ever find out what it was?
Warren: I did, it was just one leaf from a fern.
And my uncle was a geophysicist. And he identified it for me. He had collected a lot of trilobites from a nearby quarry and that had those really fired my imagination.
So, many years later, I would write Fragment about a world that had descended from that era, the era of trilobites. But what if they had gone off on their own way separate from everything else on planet Earth? What would they look like half a billion years later?
Dwayne: Hmm, OK. Now we can talk about some of the science ideas in the book. Tell us about some of those.
Warren: Well, since I’ve been studying evolution since I was a kid, I have been sort of a like an armchair biologist. I have always been endlessly fascinated by the process of evolution.
And three theories along the way occurred to me while I was studying various aspects of evolution. Two such theories are presented in Fragment and they are original theories.
One of them has gotten some interest from some actual geneticists who are studying lifespan. And that particular theory the theory of lifespan describes what dictates the lifespan of all species on Earth.
It was, basically, derived from looking at barnacles. And barnacles are something that fascinated Darwin to no end. They are amazing creatures which people don’t seem to really understand.
They are crustaceans like crabs or lobsters. And they’re obviously the weirdest crustacean on earth. And they only live for about two years. But mussels, that live right next to them, have almost an unlimited lifespan. They can live up to 70 years.
So, I was thinking, why in the world, would these two species have such a vastly different lifespan? And as I studied it, I realized that there was a difference between the way they procreate.Of course, mussels procreate by this huge bloom of sex cells that they all release all at the same time. Trillions of cells that drift in a cloud and end up creating the next generation.
Barnacles, however, have the largest sexual member in proportion to body size of any animal on earth. They must procreate by literally reaching it over to the next neighbor next to it in order to inseminate
that neighbor. That is how they create the next generation.
So that was a clue and the fact that they reach sexual maturity in one year and die. The fact that they die by the time their offspring reach sexual maturity was a giant clue.
Of course, all species on Earth become unable to procreate if they mate with their offspring. And there are all kinds of different reasons and biological barriers that stop that from happening.
And if they didn’t stop that from happening, then that species would die out in very short order. Even plants that procreate with their own offspring will become unable to procreate in only two or three
generations.
So, as I started to check this theory out by looking at animals and plants with lifespans, I found that the theory held true with absolutely every species across the board. Any animal that could theoretically,
crossbreed with their own offspring had a fixed lifespan at twice the age of sexual maturity. So that they could not compete with the next generation and mate with their own offspring.
And this is true from everything from redwoods and sequoias, to whales and to any species, you can name. But certain species get around it without lifespan, because they don’t need it.
For instance, the sequoia has made the same way that mussels do. Or the coral reefs do with giant clouds of sex sells that are all released at once. And the chances of them breeding with their own offspring are so slim that they’re infinitesimal. They are vanishingly small.
If you look at something like some whales, they congregate in giant groups and they don’t meet for life or anything. They just randomly mix in and they meet several times a year and that makes it impossible for them.
