Douglas “Hoss” Preston

The novel Blasphemy is described as:

Physicist Gregory North Hazelius sold the concept of creating a ginormous forty billion dollar “superconducting supercollider particle accelerator” based on finding a new source of energy. He knows not to tell anyone about his personal secret agenda behind why he pushed the Isabella project as it is called; he plans to duplicate the Big Bang of creation in order to speak to God.
 
The Navajo Indian Reservation in the southwest is chosen as the locale for Isabella. Work begins inside the five-hundred-square-mile Red Mesa tableland. However, the project falls behind schedule disturbing DC politicos who bet on its quick success.
 
Presidential science adviser Dr. Stanton Lockwood sends former CIA operative Wyman Ford to investigate why the delay and is there any way to propel the project back on schedule. At the same time, others strongly oppose Isabella fearing the wrath of God.

Douglas “Hoss” Preston is the best-selling author of this novel. He was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1956, and grew up in the deadly boring suburb of Wellesley. Following a distinguished career at a private nursery school — he was almost immediately expelled — he attended public schools and the Cambridge School of Weston.
 
Notable events in his early life included the loss of a fingertip at the age of three to a bicycle; the loss of his two front teeth to his brother Richard’s fist; and various broken bones, also incurred in dust-ups with Richard. (Richard went on to write The Hot Zone and The Cobra Event, which tells you all you need to know about what it was like to grow up with him as a brother.)
 
As they grew up, Hoss, Richard, and their little brother David roamed the quiet suburbs of Wellesley, terrorizing the natives with home-made rockets and incendiary devices mail-ordered from the backs of comic books or concocted from chemistry sets. With a friend they once attempted to fly a rocket into Wellesley Square; the rocket malfunctioned and nearly killed a man mowing his lawn. They were local celebrities, often appearing in the “Police Notes” section of The Wellesley Townsman. It is a miracle they survived childhood intact.
 
After unaccountably being rejected by Stanford University (a pox on it), Hoss attended Pomona College in Claremont, California, where he studied mathematics, biology, physics, anthropology, chemistry, geology, and astronomy before settling down to English literature.
 
After graduating, he began his career at the American Museum of Natural History in New York as an editor, writer, and eventually manager of publications. (He also taught writing at Princeton University and was managing editor of Curator.)
 
His eight-year stint at the Museum resulted in the non-fiction book, Dinosaurs in the Attic, edited by a rising young star at St. Martin’s Press, a polymath by the name of Lincoln Child. During this period, Hoss gave Lincoln a midnight tour of the museum, and in the darkened Hall of Late Dinosaurs, under a looming T. Rex, Lincoln turned to Hoss and said: “This would make the perfect setting for a thriller!” That thriller would, of course, be Relic.
 
In 1986, Hoss piled everything he owned into the back of a Subaru and moved from New York City to Santa Fe to write full time, following the advice of S. J. Perelman that “the dubious privilege of a freelance writer is he’s given the freedom to starve anywhere”. After the requisite period of penury, Hoss achieved a small success with the publication of Cities of Gold, a non-fiction book about Coronado’s search for the legendary Seven Cities of Cibola.
 
To research the book, Hoss and a friend retraced on horseback 1,000 miles of Coronado’s route across Arizona and New Mexico, packing their supplies and sleeping under the stars — nearly killing themselves in the process. Since then he has published several more non-fiction books on the history of the American Southwest, Talking to the Ground and The Royal Road, as well as a novel entitled Jennie.
 
In the early 1990s Hoss and Lincoln teamed up to write suspense novels; Relic was the first, followed by several others, including Riptide and Thunderhead. Relic was released as a motion picture by Paramount in 1997. Other films are under development at Hollywood studios. Hoss and Lincoln live 500 miles apart and write their books together via telephone, fax, and the Internet. Hoss continues a magazine writing career by contributing regularly to The New Yorker magazine. He has also written for National Geographic, Natural History, Smithsonian, Harper’s, and Travel & Leisure, among others.
 
His novels also include The Book of the Dead, The Wheel of Darkness, The Monster of Florence, Reliquary (Pendergast, Book 2), The Cabinet of Curiosities (Pendergast, Book 3), Dance of Death, Still Life with Crows (Pendergast, Book 4), Brimstone (Pendergast, Book 5), Mount Dragon, The Ice Limit, The Codex, and Tyrannosaur Canyon.
 
Hoss is a Research Associate at the Laboratory of Anthropology in Santa Fe, a member of PEN New Mexico, and a board member of the School of American Research in Santa Fe. He counts in his ancestry the poet Emily Dickinson, the newspaperman Horace Greeley, and the infamous murderer and opium addict Amasa Greenough. Hoss and his wife, Christine, have three children, Selene, Aletheia, and Isaac. They live on the coast of Maine.
 
Listen to him on Hour 25. Watch Science vs. God in BLASPHEMY.