Petaluma Profile: Novelist Ransom Stephens destroys the world (almost)

A new novel by Petaluma writer Ransom Stephens asks an increasingly relevant question: Can a person be too rich? In “Too Rich to Die,” Stephens, a novelist, physicist and technologist, imagines a world in which one man threatens to scoop up all the dough in the mixing bowl.

San Francisco techie Eben Scratch has become the world’s first trillionaire, thanks to a banking app he controls (his former lover created it, and boy, is she angry). Like his namesake from Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol,” Eben’s greed has ruined his life and just might ruin the world. It’s up to the “Time Weavers” to stop him - Simon, who believes he can alter the course of history by meddling with the intersection of past and future; Fiona, proprietor of a bar-bookstore where cocktails are matched to literature; and Volodya, a Russian hacker whose software calculates the probabilities for different futures.

With his background in divergent fields, it’s not surprising that Stephens’s novels mix disparate things to reveal links and depths. “Too Rich to Die” mixes money and love. Its predecessor, “The 99% Solution,” mixed left and rightwing politics, and featured the same trio of Time Weavers. An earlier novel, “The God Patent,” mixed science and religion, while his first novel, “The Sensory Deception,” mixed environmentalism and technology.

Stephens and his wife Karen Garber, a hospice nurse, settled in Petaluma in 2005. A fifth generation Californian, he grew up in Walnut Creek, graduating from Las Lomas High school. After earning an undergraduate degree at the University of California San Diego, he went on to get masters and doctorate degrees in physics at the University of California Santa Barbara. He spent a decade in Arlington, Texas, teaching university physics before returning to the Bay Area, where he worked for Agilent in Santa Rosa.

He is now a full-time writer.

“I love living in near downtown Petaluma,” he said. “I can walk into town. I can sit by the river.”

According to Stephens, he has always been a writer, starting in high school. He feels that the ability to write has helped him achieve many of his goals, first in physics and information technology, and now in non-fiction and fiction.

“Especially in tech, where good writing is a rare talent, being a writer made a difference,” he said.

The most important influence on his writing was Tamim Ansary, an American author who ran the San Francisco Writers Workshop for many years. Stephens credits Ansary for teaching him the importance of character development.

The inspiration for “Too Rich to Die” came by a chance encounter with a stranger. Stephens had recently seen the Dickens play “A Christmas Carol.” One day on Mission Street in San Francisco, he saw a modern-day Scrooge - an angry, scowling man wearing jeans (pressed, expensive) and a hoodie (immaculately white, expensive).

“He was the guy,” Stephens said, adding, “My peculiar talent is to make complicated things simple without simplifying them. I just taught a two-day intensive physics seminar at University of Oxford, and it was the same challenge.”

In writing fiction, he explains, he’s learned a couple tricks to keep complicated things simple.

“Always look at the scene from the character’s point of view, increment by increment,” he said. “Every time I’m stuck it’s because I’m not in the character’s heads.”

He also makes sure the characters interact enough to hold the reader’s interest, despite any science or technology involved in the scene.

Stephens learned a valuable principle about writing dialogue from author Stephanie Moore. Dubbed “the irony of effective dialogue,” it asserts that when two people have a conversation, they only intermittently connect in the same stream of thought. Each wanders along on a path of their own, tugged between personal thoughts and the words of the other person.

“This kind of talk feels more real-except when everything is on the line,” Stephens said. “The hard thing for me with Too Rich To Die was that two of the main characters are hateful.”

Besides greedy Scratch, there is Allison, the ex-girlfriend who wrote the software that Scratch controls. She is bitter and broken down.

“To write evil characters,” he said, “I have to understand them.”

Stephens’s novels are whimsical, fun reads. While full of ominous reflections on the fate of humanity and the planet, they are not dystopian downers. He views tech, for instance, as ambivalent. He points out that its first uses were for weapons and porn. But tech could also help us save ourselves and the planet. This view makes him more optimist than pessimist.

“I believe in democracy,” he said, “even though it will never be perfect, and it requires consensus.”

Working in the lower-level studio in his home, Stephens writes first thing in the morning, before opening email or becoming otherwise distracted. He generally writes for half of the day.

In addition to his fiction, Stephens is the author of “The Left Brain Speaks, the Right Brain Laughs: A Look at the Neuroscience of Innovation & Creativity in Art, Science and Life.” For the book, he did deep research on the brain because he wanted to know what makes a good novel from the reader’s perspective.

“I wrote it in hopes of becoming a better fiction writer,” he said.

Stephens has two new projects under way.

The first is “The Book of Bastards,” currently being shopped to publishers. He describes it as “bawdiness washed down with a sip of moral justice.” The book is set in medieval times, with fairies and pirates. The other is “The Genesis Chain,” working title for a collaboration with Brian D. Anderson, with whom Stephens shares an agent. Anderson brought the idea to Stephens and asked him “to make the puzzle puzzlier.”

That, clearly, is what Stephens, scientist and author, lives to do.

Said Stephens, “I write high-concept fiction to blow your mind.”

(“Too Rich to Die” is available at Copperfield’s Books. For more information on Stephens and his books, go ransomstephens.com)