On the Spot at BSC – Carlos J. Cortes interview

Carlos J. Cortes’s debut novel, Perfect Circle, is one that is so polished and exciting you might expect it to have been written by someone with many more novels under his belt. It’s a novel that, as the back of the book states, “asks if man and nature are fated to clash – or if the right man can break the cycle.”

I was impressed with the book’s tightly wrought narrative, the suspenseful fast pace of the plot, and the realistically motivated characters enough to ask Carlos if he would grant me the privilege of doing an interview with him, and I and the staff at BSC are pleased that he kindly agreed to my request.

And now, on to the questions . . .

    
Professor Crazy: Carlos, I guessed at one of your possible influences in my review of Perfect Circle, when I said it reminded me of the writing of the late Michael Crichton. I didn’t really know at the time if he was an influence on you or not.

Could you please let us know a few of the authors who have been an influence on your writing?

    
Carlos J Cortes: From childhood, I’ve looked upon books as windows through which we can dream, share the experiences of others, and learn, though not necessarily in that order. I love John Le Carre because in another re-incarnation I want to write like him. Frederick Forsyth because we share a zest for writing about people we’ve known and experiences we’ve endured. And yes, the late Michael Crichton for his inhuman capacity for research and his ability to weave the aridest of data into splendid plots.

    
Professor Crazy: Drilling a world-record depth of over four miles in the Congo (or anywhere) is, as you describe in your book, an expensive and complex endeavor, requiring an enormous economic outlay and people with a wide variety of skills, perhaps especially involving engineering. It’s worth the expense to Hugh Reece, the majority owner and President of IMC International Mining Corporation) and the grandfather to the novel’s hero, Paul, though.

Would you tell us how much your own background in engineering helped you write the book, like in getting certain details correct?

    
Carlos J. Cortes: Very much. I spent almost twenty years of my life building hardened structures, most of them buried, in the most inhospitable places and scattered across six continents. To write about core drilling in jungle conditions, or setting up the infrastructure for a dig, I only had to draw from experience—from when I was much younger and considerably crazier.

    
Professor Crazy: Near the beginning of Perfect Circle, Paul Reece has broken ties with his grandfather and almost everyone else at IMC. He’s living with his girlfriend, Carmen, in a little village in the Honduras called Coquizate. He’s located a rich vein of opals ($20 million worth) not far from the village, and it seems as if he’s thoroughly happy with his new life there.

I was impressed with your amount of realism about life there and knowing things like that there’s an old path, the Vereda del Diablo, or Devil’s Path, “on the slopes of the Agalta cordillera, halfway up between the rugged peaks and Olancho Valley.”

Have you ever traveled to and/or lived in the Honduras yourself to know so much about the region?

    
Carlos J. Cortes: Yes. I’ve worked and lived in more than thirty countries including Honduras. I’ve roughed it—and shared unspeakable food, banter and mites with the locals—done a stint in a Nigerian prison camp and crossed frontiers tucked inside the trunk of a car. I’ve also experienced the debauchery of war and local revolts in Africa and South America.

    
Professor Crazy: Hugh Reece seems to love and care for Paul on some level – though perhaps one buried as deep as the mine shaft IMC excavates. His love for the corporation and keeping the Reece dynasty alive seems to be what he’s more concerned with, though.

Yet, he manages to convince Paul to go to the Congo and help, despite being the one behind his ex-wife’s infidelity with Paul’s father, Walter, which resulted in their deaths in a plane crash when she was giving Walter oral sex.

For anyone who has not read Perfect Circle or my review of it, could you please tell us what made Paul decide to leave Carmen and his life in the Honduras to go to the Ituri National Park in the Congo and help out there?

    
Carlos J. Cortes: Walter’s terminal blowjob gives readers a peek into my twisted mind. My woman cringes at the thought, but since we are going to die anyway, why not do it like Attila or Alexander and depart this valley of woe while on the job? Way to go. But I’m digressing.

Paul goes to the Congo because he can’t resist the same pull that drove Hillary to the Everest, Amundsen to the South Pole or Piccard to the Mariana’s trench. If time travel or stepping across the looking glass were possible, and given the chance, I bet most of us would volunteer.

    
Professor Crazy: The core sample that’s brought up of a strange artifact IMC discovers, detected by them when a satellite they have use of locates a magnetic anomaly, is of the artifact’s outer shell. The sample is composed of two joined layers, one that’s rubber-like and one that’s concrete-like, under certain temperature ranges. The layers have many other, unique attributes to them that could potentially revolutionize many industries.

Did you do much research to come up with the composition of the artifact, and to describe how the sample and flecks found in it might revolutionize the world by the advanced technology apparent in its creation?

    
Carlos J. Cortes: Yes. Physics and chemistry don’t change, only our understanding of them. Universal laws, thermodynamics, and relativity are constraints that we’ll never be able to skip. Yes, I know some aspects of quantum physics seem to be at odds with relativity but suspiciously only involving particles with no apparent mass.

In my opinion, technology will shape the future: composites, ceramics, nanotubes and, in particular, organic/inorganic hybrids. Buckyballs and Buckytubes are with us now, and the foamed metals featured in Perfect Circle could conceivable, in the not so distant future, become available.

The woodpecker’s bill is a good example. A woodpecker may strike a tree up to 20 times a second with staggering deceleration forces as high as 1200 g. I based the advanced metals in Perfect Circle on the woodpecker beak’s inner foam-like structure, which gives it an amazing resilience with almost no weight.

    
Professor Crazy: Your novel contains an environmental message, though you don’t get too preachy with it. Part of Paul’s angry feelings towards his grandfather and IMC are because of an environmental disaster IMC caused in Bangladesh.

Did you plan from the outset of this novel to include an environmental message, and will there be one in your forthcoming novel,The Prisoner?

    
Carlos J. Cortes: Although my publishers used the environmental-message angle when promoting Perfect Circle, it was never my intention to write about conservationism.

    
Perfect Circle offers an admittedly far-fetched and improbable mechanism—namely that the earth suffers a cyclic cataclysm—to account for scores of unexplained gaps in geology and paleontology. From the tabula rasa resulting from such a disaster, the scant survivors must start again. That is the meaning of Perfect Circle.

I believe in conservation awareness because the earth resources are finite but I’m skeptical about the much-touted global warming. Earth has gone through four recorded ice ages and, probably, scores of unrecorded ones. It wouldn’t surprise me if in the future, governments race to set afire anything that can burn and produce greenhouse gasses to stay another glacial age.

    
Professor Crazy: One of the parts I liked about Perfect Circle is the subplot involving the CIA’s extreme interest in and measures taken by them to gain whatever IMC and Paul finds down the mineshaft for themselves and the United States. If it takes staging an attack on the Ituri mining camp by rebel insurgents and the slaughtering of everyone there, it doesn’t matter to them—the ends justify the means.

You write about the CIA so realistically that, at times, I wondered if you might have had direct experience working for a secret service at some point in your life.

What is it about the artifact that the CIA would be so interested in that they’d go to such lengths to obtain it?

    
Carlos J. Cortes: If I told you, I’d have to kill you. Just kidding. Though I’ve never worked directly for any intelligence agency, my hardened-structure-building stint was mostly classified, and brought me into contact with the fraternity of intelligence operatives. In my experience, the trait that singles out intelligence agencies is their rabid patriotism, and the CIA is not an exception.

In Perfect Circle, the existence of a 50,000 year-old buried structure, made from concrete and advanced composites, could solve the world’s energy conundrum and set the United States many years ahead of the rest of the world. To leave such awesome resources in the hands of a private corporation would be madness. In my novel, I muse that most CIA guys and gals may not be geniuses, but they’re not stupid either.

    
Professor Crazy: On to the topic everyone eventually thinks of when they think of Africa and the Congo – that’s right, pygmies! Pygmies in general and the pygmy Leon Kibassa in particular, play a very important role in Perfect Circle. They seem to have known exactly what would be found in the shaft before IMC ever began drilling. Their oral history and prophecies told about the alien artifact and its crucial importance to the continuation of humanity.

You write that the original inhabitants of the Earth were pygmies, and mention some examples were skeletons have been discovered even in North America.

Where did you hear/read about the pygmies being the first inhabitants of our planet? Or, is what Leon says his interpretation of his people’s history more than reality?

    
Carlos J. Cortes: It’s generally accepted that Hominini, the tribe of Homininae that comprises humans, apes, and their extinct ancestors, originated in the woods and savannas of Africa. They were tiny for modern standards and black. Like everything else in evolution, these two traits make excellent sense. Size is important when resources are scarce or hazardous to bag. Skin color is critical in areas of strong insolation: a naked pale hominid would last a few hours at most in the Kalahari, where the San have lived since the dawn of history.

In 1837, Gentlemen’s Magazine reported a number of human skeletons from 3 to 4 1/2 feet tall found buried in tiny wooden coffins near Cochocton, Ohio. Later, in 1876, the Anthropological Institute discovered an ancient graveyard of vast proportions in Coffee County, Tennessee with up to 100,000 pygmies buried there.

    
Professor Crazy: Leon asks Paul to recover something Kibassa calls “the colors of the rainbow,” from the artifact. He’s not some Skittles addict; the colors of the rainbow are necessary to save a remnant of humankind when the poles shift, huge ocean waves scour the planet, and all sorts of other nasty things happen to the Earth.

What specifically is it that Leon is referring to here by colors of the rainbow?

    
Carlos J. Cortes: All my adult life I’ve been fascinated by a seemingly intractable problem. Imagine a sizable meteoroid was in a collision course with Earth. Regardless of the remedies offered by fanciful films and SF sagas, we would be close to extinction after such an impact. Say the unavoidable collision will happen in a year or two. How could we leave the treasures of our civilization to anyone who may survive?

As I point out in Perfect Circle, suddenly wiping out a species as numerous and adapted as ours is exceedingly difficult. Nevertheless, such a global catastrophe may render Earth unstable and barely inhabitable for up to one-hundred thousand years. Stone erodes and crumbles and most metals—if subjected to aggressive atmospheres—quickly deteriorate. One solution would be to bury whatever we legate to posterity at great depth. But this poses another problem. How could we tell our future kin about the gift we’ve bequeathed?

These thoughts shaped the mechanism of our forbears’ message in Perfect Circle. Oral tradition is notably inaccurate and, in time, will lapse into legend. The “colors of the rainbow” is a legend with the instruction to arrange a set of colored disks into the correct order; that of the visible light’s spectrum; from high to low-energy: blue, green, yellow, orange, and red. This will decipher the message.

    
Professor Crazy: There is a human/alien hybrid in the novel, Nestor, who has two thumbs on each hand. This is supposed to be one example of his higher state of evolution from the rest of us average Joes and Janes.

Besides being possibly helpful in hitchhiking, what other advantages would having two thumbs on each hand offer if mankind ever was fortunate enough to evolve to this stage?

    
Carlos J. Cortes: Our bodies have evolved over millions of years, acquiring traits that could improve our chances of survival and losing others whose usefulness lapse. We’ve owned color vision for fewer than ten-thousand years and have lost our tail—the coccyx bone at the end of our spine is the only vestige left. One of the changes with greater impact in our success as species is our opposing thumbs. Yet, the weakest digits in our hands and feet are the little fingers and toes respectively. In Perfect Circle I suggested that if our body continues to evolve, our descendants in the distant future may develop stronger little fingers and lose their little toes.

    
Professor Crazy: Just one more question. What’s the subject of your forthcoming novel, The Prisoner, and when can we expect it to be released?

    
Carlos J. Cortes: I based The Prisoner’s plot in two facts:

By 2060 the prison system will cost the taxpayer up to one trillion-dollar a year to run and will cripple the U.S economy.

In 2004, scientists announced they had isolated the protein-synthesis mechanism the squirrels used to trigger hibernation and concluded that human trials would follow within a decade.

Human trials started in 2008.

The Prisoner is a work of fiction, but the science underlying human hibernation exists. Teams of scientists, both in the United States and in Europe, are at present actively engaged in human hibernation research.

Just like the discovery of fireworks led inevitably to the cannon, human hibernation, if conquered, could change the future prison systems.

The Prisoner is a story of what could happen when politicians appropriate cutting-edge technology, not to serve their fellow citizens, but to get rid of their opponents and troublesome individuals, or settle personal scores.

I checked Random House’s Web site where they’ve slatted The Prisoner’s release for September 29, 2009.

    
Professor Crazy: I and the staff of BSC once again extend our warm thanks to Carlos J Cortes for granting this interview, and we wish you the most heart-felt wishes for your continued success! With Perfect Circle, you have written a realistic account of the discovery of an alien artifact and its implications to the very fate of mankind. It’s a novel everyone who likes novels like Michael Crichton’s, and good scifi written by anyone, will want to add to their reading lists.