Libby McGugan
Libby McGugan was born 1972 in Airdrie, a small town east of Glasgow in Scotland, to a Catholic mother and a Protestant-turned-atheist father, who loved science. She enjoyed a mixed diet of quantum physics, spiritual instinct, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. Her ambition was to grow up and join the Rebel alliance in a galaxy Far, Far away. Instead she went to Glasgow University and studied medicine.
A practicing doctor, she has worked in Scotland, in Australia with the Flying Doctors service, and for a few months, in a field hospital in the desert. She loves traveling and the diversity that is the way different people see the world, and has been trekking in the Himalaya of Bhutan, potholing in Sarawak, backpacking in Chile and Europe and diving in Cairns.
McGugan's debut novel is The Eidolon.
From the author's Q & A with Paul F Cockburn for The List:
How would you describe The Eidolon?Read the complete Q & A.
A science fiction thriller that explores the nature of reality through an edge-of-the-seat storyline featuring dark matter, the CERN laboratory, and the boundary between the living and the dead. That’s my publisher’s description, and it’s better than the one I came up with.
* * *
How much research did you need to do for the book?
It’s tricky to say. I was still researching when it came to the final edit. I visited CERN a few years ago, just as they were preparing for the LHC warm up; that gave me a sense of what an unbelievable endeavour it is, how powerful our drive is to understand things. It’s a huge feat of cooperation crossing political, geographical and specialist boundaries. I spent a bit of time in Geneva to get a feel for writing the scenes that are set there. And I’ve done a fair amount of travelling and trekking, so I drew on those experiences for the Tibetan scenes at the start of the book. The medical scenes were easy to write, as that’s my day job!
Learn more about the book and author at Libby McGugan's website.
The Page 69 Test: The Eidolon.
--Marshal Zeringue
