Look and Listen

Biography

Award winning author Mark Whiteway lives in rural West Sussex, England, near the former home of H G Wells. The Lodestone Series is his first foray into the world of Science Fiction. Mark lives with his wife Sandra.

Inspiration

Writing SciFi has been a long held ambition of mine. As a kid, I read everything–Wells, Verne, Heinlein, etc., etc. At twelve years old, I wrote a novella. (I still have it, hand-written in a huge ledger). It was about our sun going nova, and the resulting breakdown of society, as told through the eyes of three boys. It’s pretty moving stuff and has something of a surreal ending. Following that, life intervened, and it was only in April ’09 that I determined that I wanted to get back to writing. I had had several ideas running around in my head for some time, of which the Lodestone concept was probably the strongest. As I began to develop the story, it rapidly became clear that there was no way I was going to be able to cover it all in a single book, and so the Lodestone Series was born. The Lodestone Series sprang from an idea that I had had for a little while. Einstein's relativity theory predicts the existence of negative matter, (not to be confused with antimatter or dark matter, which are completely different phenomena). Although we have never found any, we know it would have some pretty weird properties, like negative inertia and negative gravity. I started to think, what would happen to a society where this stuff existed? I wrote the books in such a way that you do not need to know anything at all about science in order to enjoy the story. However, the theory behind it is interesting and quite elegant. For example, if lodestone repels all other matter, you may wonder why it doesn’t fall upwards in the planet’s gravity rather than downwards. It’s all to do with the way gravity works. For the physicists among us, here is the answer! mia = -G.mp.Ma ______ 2 r