Tales From the New Astronomy

Welcome to the Neil Woodhall author blog. Supercluster Stories is a series of fiction books which explore new insights from the new astronomy. After telling you a bit about myself, I’ll explain how these stories came to be.

Hi, I’m Neil and I’m retired. My wife, Stina, and I raised three sons. Four grandchildren have brought new joys to our family. It’s a good life but I wanted to expand my horizons by becoming an independent author.

To be an indy author I created a business, which I named Gomonish Entertainment. That word comes from the fictional name given to the supercluster of galaxies where Earth resides. Astronomers call it Laniakea. These Supercluster Stories (SCS) are a series that use this vast gravity group as an enormous stage for character development.

“The End of the Sixties” is the author’s first full length book. It can be purchased on Amazon in three formats – hardcover, paperback, and Kindle. Sequels are being prepared. The first part of this project will be called the JeshNim Trilogy.

Our Supercluster

Gomonish will be the main focus of the Supercluster Stories blog. A second main category, Quest for the New Normal, will focus on the health of our communities in a rapidly changing world.

Two categories bring up an interesting question. If we live on one planet, then why would we care about our vast supercluster? The short answer is this – new astronomy points to Gomonish as being the place which will be our home in the sky for longer than anything else we know about. Some people, me included, believe in the likelihood of eternal life. If we continue living after leaving this planet, then our existence has to be somewhere. Our supercluster will get us started but, as you will see, things don’t end there.

How did it happen that a gigantic clump of galaxies became important to this author? Two different paths started me looking in that direction. The first is why I chose the sixties as the background for my first book. The second is the need for invisible characters to propel that story forward.

Endless Horizon

Here are a few highlights …

I have a vivid memory from the 1950s, when I was about ten years old. I was standing in a wheat field, all alone, absorbed in the vastness of blue sky and endless horizon. In my limited understanding of the world there were two things I was trying to sort out in my young mind. Over there in Paris they had these people called existentialists and they said that life had no meaning. Down at the local church our pastor told us that the meaning of life was going to heaven, not hell. I didn’t believe any of that. I wasn’t sure what I did believe but I made up my mind to get that figured out. I’ve been thinking about it ever since. Now I write books.

Later on, I went away to college. The sixties hit like a social hurricane. At one point, in 1967, out in San Francisco, they held a public funeral for the Death of Hippy. That odd spectacle triggered the beginnings of my storyline. It held within it the essence of a mystery. Some sort of “sixties vibe” had reached us from the “great beyond.” A small group on the west coast felt that this cosmic vibe had suddenly died. Why?

Transcendental Intensity

The ferocious fury of the sixties whisked me away, like a tornado to the Land of Oz. When this whirlwind was at its peak, in 1968, I tried to write down what it felt like to be living inside such awesome transcendental intensity. Words failed. Determination inspired me to carry on.

The seventies entered the scene. Life felt hollow compared to the social circus of the sixties. I got married and we had kids. Family always came first. Writing was relegated to second place. But I always kept writing.

By the late eighties the three boys had grown big enough that I didn’t have to spend every minute of night and day worrying. My writing, and more importantly my reading, blossomed during that period of my life. Those were the years when plot and backstory came together.

I completed a rough draft of “The End of the Sixties.” After passing it around to family and friends I arrived at a distressingly obvious conclusion. My writing skills were weak. The human characters weren’t half bad, but the invisible characters fell completely flat. I needed those invisible beings to work out the full range of my story. Grand cosmic events, whether real or imagined, require a substantial background.

Supercluster Mapping

The path to vivid inspiration was twisty and arduous. As I did more research the backstory got more complicated. My search for an appropriate setting led slowly, inexorably, to superclusters.

During the eighties the big scientific fad was superstring theory. That was a rough slog. During the nineties the fad shifted to supercluster mapping. That’s when things got interesting.

After a plausible story-arc had formed in my mind, two choices lay before me. I could turn to SFF (science fiction and fantasy) for my character models. Or I could take the plunge and align these new characters with rapidly emerging insights from the new astronomy. After experimenting with both, I chose science. The story you have before you sprang from cold astrophysics mixed generously with warm characters.

Which, oddly enough, brings us back to me standing in that wheat field, trying to figure out the existentialists and the preacher.

By the late nineties I had decided to rebuff the existentialists and promote my firmly held belief that life does indeed have grand meaning. You just need to figure out how to find the cosmic connection inside of yourself. People have been doing that for as long as stories have been told.

Telescopes cannot find Heaven or Hell. They won’t be able to locate Middle Earth. Nor can they discover Trayastrimsa or Bhuvarloka. Interestingly, telescopes are not what defined superclusters. Super-computers crunched the raw data from observatories and this new vision of where we reside was developed by those astronomers who analyzed that data. That’s when the challenge for me, as a writer, became strengthening the connection between the tale I was creating and this new astronomy.

Astro Physics rode to the rescue, accompanied by their wacky sidekick String Theory.

Universe Is Expanding

At the dawn of the third millennium, in 2000, the boys were getting old enough to move out into the world and take care of themselves. That meant I had more time to write. Fortunately for me, all those years spent struggling and researching and failing left me with an oversupply of material.

Unexpected concepts from deep space physics needed to be contemplated. The universe is expanding. Because of that expansion, Laniakea (Gomonish) will eventually become isolated. Millions of superclusters that we see today will vanish from the sight of future astronomers. Then it gets even weirder. Over spectacularly vast stretches of time, allness will slowly evaporate into nothingness.

Our minister down at the church never told us about that part.

These concepts are difficult to grasp. But here’s the deal. If hard fought facts, extracted from observational astronomy, tell us what our cosmic neighborhood actually does look like, then we need to take that seriously.

Invisible Companions

Two popular science books were published during the decade when I was struggling with these challenges. They provided me with enough solid material to revive my spirits. “The Five Ages of the Universe” by Fred Adams and Greg Laughlin (2000), forced me to toss out most of favorite ideas. What I gained in return was a more reliable framework. The second book, “Warped Passages” by Lisa Randall (2005), showed me how to describe this strangeness in terms that make sense to regular readers. With these insights close at hand, the flickering images in my mind began to form new plot lines extracted from my writer’s heart.

Slowly but surely, several character types emerged. Humans I understand because I am one. Anca, those fictional invisible companions of ours here on Earth, are not quite elves, not quite angels, but they have a familiarity about them. Ishmili were modeled on vague seraphim precursors. Soto entered the storyline as a character type similar to anca but from a different expansion region. With increasing ease, a fun story developed.

Then, after I was well on my way to finishing the book, a new character type intruded itself upon my tall tale. That was extremely inconvenient, but characters have been known to do such things.

Flash beings live larger lives than anca or soto but they aren’t up to the level of ishmili. This new form of being filled a gap in the invisible hierarchy. The more I thought about it, the more I realized how important it was to have someone occupy that niche.

Larger View

After self-publishing “The End of the Sixties” (EO60s) on Amazon, I took a much-needed break. After some rest and relaxation, fresh story ideas began percolating. Before starting on the sequels, I needed to get this author website up and running.

This blog will be a convenient place to expand these concepts into additional Supercluster Stories. EO60s is a picaresque tale told on a grand scale. I would enjoy finding out what readers think, which questions they have, and hearing criticisms that can be delivered to my internet doorstep.

The JeshNim Trilogy gives names to characters and places which populate our supercluster neighborhood. Each character type occupies their own level within this larger view. All of us are connected and our lives appear to be linked in ways we can dimly see.

Join with me on this grand adventure of the imagination, in our recently redefined cosmic backyard.