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Imagine you were trapped in a time loop, living the same few days over and over with no end in sight. How would you react? What would you do? And what would it mean to you if you could connect with the one other person who might be going through the same thing?
In Peninsula sci-fi and fantasy author Mike Chen’s newest novel, “A Quantum Love Story,” these themes are explored through the perspectives of Mariana Pineda, a scientist grieving a recent personal loss, and Carter Cho, who has family issues of his own. Strangers brought together by supremely bizarre circumstances at a mysterious Bay Area particle accelerator, they find that their relationship can develop even as time stands still.
“What is it like for two people to be stuck when their world does not change but they do?” Chen said of the mind-bending adventure, which he called “as close to romance as I can write.” The novel is “a slow burn love story of two people coming to understand each other and how they can change each other.”
There’s something about the idea of a time loop that’s endlessly fascinating. A few things, actually, according to Chen. One is the ability to reset; to get infinite do-overs.
“I’m sure we all wish we had that at some point. Resetting until you get it right – it would be wonderful to turn on that ability,” he said. Another is the wish-fulfillment aspect of being able to take whatever actions you want, knowing that you won’t suffer any consequences, for better or worse.
“I think that’s a really interesting thought experiment: If you have x amount of time where you know you can get away with anything, what are you gonna do?” he said. (Personally, he’d probably spend every night out catching concerts at clubs, he said.)
Of course, it’s not all fun and games, being forced to relive the same days on repeat. And part of the existential unease Mariana and Carter sometimes feel was inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic. Chen wrote the story during the pandemic’s early days.
“We were all kind of feeling like we were in a time loop,” he said. “I wanted to capture that sense of, there’s joy and dread and also kind of uncertainty. It was a very, very specific feeling.”
Chen’s novels cover a range of intriguing scenarios, including time travel (“Here and Now and Then”), vampires (“Vampire Weekend”), superheroes (“We Could Be Heroes”), alien abductions (“Light Years From Home”) and even a devastating pandemic (“A Beginning at the End,” released with eerily, accidentally prescient timing in January 2020). They’re all character- and relationship-driven at their hearts, though, with the sometimes fantastical and far-out elements providing an outline for the very human stories contained within.
“I feel lucky that I’ve managed to sneak into the right zeitgeist moment with that sort of thing,” he said. “I’m trying to take the stories that I really, really enjoy but put it in a framework that I also really enjoy. I’m just lucky the market supports it right now.”
A lifelong Bay Area resident, his books (not including his New York Times bestseller “Star Wars: Brotherhood,” or his forthcoming comics series “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – The Dog of War”), tend to have local settings (look for mentions of Books Inc. and Red Rock Coffee in the Mountain View-set “Light Years From Home.”) You may also catch frequent references to University of California at Davis, Chen’s alma mater. His novels have other hallmarks too, including plentiful musical references.
“If you look at the different pieces of what makes up my personality it’s, like, music and sci-fi and fantasy,” he said. While he started playing classical piano as a child, it wasn’t until he picked up a guitar around age 13 that “suddenly everything about playing music changed for me,” he recalled. He dove into the worlds of indie rock, new wave and punk, finding an outlet for understanding emotions – from melancholy and longing to angst and anger – he didn’t previously have the language to grapple with.
“I realize that a lot of my obsession with music, which still continues, came from having these immigrant parents who did not know how to talk about feelings. I realize now I was looking for an outlet to process this,” he said. Once in college, he met others who shared his musical passions, and eventually he started playing in bands and DJing around the Bay Area.
“I was much cooler then,” he said with a laugh, noting that for the first decade of their relationship he and his wife were out at gigs every week.
“Integrating it into my books is kind of me nerding out about it and trying to give these characters life in the way I find music so profound and important,” he said.
Another important aspect of Chen’s life reflected in his books is his dedication to animal rescue, with memorable cat and dog characters populating his stories.
“I’m trying to put each of my animals in a book, so it gives them a little bit of immortality that way,” he said.
In “A Quantum Love Story,” Maggie the cat is modeled after his real life “really annoying” yet “really loving and cute” kitty. An endearing canine character, meanwhile, is modeled on and named for the beloved dog of his wife’s stepfather, a gentle giant of a pitbull who loved hugs.
Chen and his wife have had numerous rescue pets of over the years (they currently have three cats, including the aforementioned Maggie) and used to volunteer at the Peninsula Humane Society’s kitten nursery, one of several Bay Area animal rescues he’s been involved with.
“It’s just something that is really important to me,” he said. “If I have this platform where I’m reaching the general public, I’m going to advocate for animal rescue just to give it some visibility.”
Chen became a father midway through the writing of his first book. The keen observation skills that come with parenthood have helped deepen his awareness of the range of human expression and interactions.
“Part of being a parent, in an indirect way, makes me a better writer,” he said. “If you’re a good parent you try to be in tune to reading your kids’ emotions…and their relationships with their teacher or whoever, and you can take that and start to write more complex characters that way,” he said. He noted that many of the parent-child relationships he’s written about are problematic ones, between adult children and their families. “I guess part of me is trying to write what I don’t want to happen with my own kid,” he mused.
He also has some go-to tricks for helping flesh out his characters (casting actors in his mind) as well as for naming them.
“I’m really bad at naming characters and so what I started doing – this was way, way back when – I would just pick a theme for something that interests me and name characters based on that,” he said. “In ‘Light Years From Home’ they’re all ‘Assassin’s Creed’ characters. In ‘Vampire Weekend’ it’s a lot of people I played music with throughout my life,” he said. And in “A Beginning at the End,” they’re named after ‘90s indie rockers.
“It’s just finding a little way to nod at these things but not be too obvious about it,” he said.
How does Chen, who holds down a day job as a marketing writer for a tech company in addition to being a busy father, find the time and headspace to be such a prolific writer?
“I have a very engineer-y brain,” he said. “When I was in college, I learned to compartmentalize my time. When I went there I had this stereotypical Asian parent thing of, ‘You must pick a major that will give you a career,'” he said. He majored in mechanical engineering but decided to commit to taking an extra class each quarter in different aspects of the arts, ending up with a minor in theater.
“It really comes down to, I’m really good at time management.” he said. He’s also learned, “through the wonder of therapy,” that for him, creative writing is a coping mechanism for escaping from the pressures of day-to-day life, especially during the pandemic years when he was homeschooling his child in addition to working.
“I realized that being able to dive into my own head, where I had no responsibilities to anyone except the characters in my brain, was like my comfort zone,” he said.
Now, “the trick is making sure it stays in a healthy balance.” Chen makes an effort to set aside evenings for family time and to be self-aware of his tendencies to get lost down the rabbit hole of writing.
“I really enjoy creating my characters and having them do things in their own little worlds,” he said.
Mike Chen will appear in conversation with writer Kristin Baver at Books Inc. Palo Alto, 855 El Camino Real #74, at 7 p.m. on Jan. 30.