Double-edged fiction from Dunedin writer
Simon Heath’s first novel is aptly named. A doppelganger, in modern parlance, is a double or a look-alike of a person. And while there is surely only one Simon Heath, the Dunedin resident does live a life of duality, with one foot in the business world as a successful communications consultant and the other in the arts world as a playwright, theatre administrator and, since December, a novelist.
Doppelganger itself has a dual nature as well. On the one hand, it’s a good old-fashioned thrill of a read, a book that posits a question – when a man who habitually throws himself against the window of his 38th floor office as part of a motivational speech about risk-taking one day goes right through the window and plunges to his death, how would that effect the people who are close to him? – and attempts to answer it. On the other hand, it’s a treatise on the quantum mechanics of time, a piece of speculative fiction in the style of The Matrix or Fight Club which contemplates the possibility that time is both particle and wave, allowing more than one reality to exist simultaneously. In this context, a more ancient definition of “doppelganger” comes into play, one that says that if you happen to see your double, as that man with the 38th floor office does on his coffee break moments before his fall, it means your realities are colliding and you’re not long for this world.
Heath can explain the nuances of quantum theory in depth, and tends to do so in a rapid-fire delivery. Expect a few tangents as well – he might give you a ten-minute history of Toronto’s Rochdale College or throw in a real-world explanation of Zeno’s Paradox during the course of the conversation. All of this is evidence of a curious mind, something that comes through on the pages of Doppelganger as well.
“I like ideas,” says Heath. “I like to take them apart and put them together again, and hopefully readers go away with a broader understanding of their reality.”
Many of Heath’s ideas, and some of his characters as well, come from the experiences he’s had as a communications consultant for a veritable who’s who of corporate and government entities. His other literary project, an unpublished trilogy called Power, tells the tale of a family who escapes Toronto during a worldwide power outage caused by a solar storm. An electrical engineer tipped him off to that possibility during a year-long gig working on communications strategies for Hydro One. Apparently, we are about to enter a period of increased solar activity. The last time this happened, in 1859, northern lights were seen over the Caribbean and telegraph systems all over Europe and North America failed. This got Heath to thinking, as things usually do, and next thing you know he was half-way through a trilogy of novels.
“I just asked myself, ‘what would we do without power?,’” he says. “The rest is kind of an intellectual exercise.”
Heath has been shopping the manuscripts for Doppelganger and Escape, the first novel of the Power trilogy, to agents and publishing houses for the last couple of years. Times are not good for the Canadian publishing industry, however, so last fall he decided to go a different route – to self-publish Doppelganger and hope to rally enough momentum with that book to generate professional interest for the other three.
“It’s a decision that more and more creative people are being forced to make,” he said of the choice to go it alone. “In one way, the Internet makes it easier than ever to do. But on the other hand, it puts authors in a position they may not be comfortable with, having to market their work themselves. People keep telling me I need to start a blog and start tweeting, for example, but I can’t bring myself to go there.”
Doppelganger was released in December and is available at Curiosity House Books or online (in book form at lulu.com or as an ebook at smashwords.com/books/view/239943). Heath has since acquired an agent for the Power trilogy, and with any luck (and some significant sales) he may not have to worry about marketing for much longer. There are, after all, many more questions to ask, and countless tangents to explore.
