Chris Angus | The Impact of History

I was a history major in college, and I’ve always felt it was a perfect choice, given my career as a writer. I can’t imagine writing a novel without setting it in some specific place and time in history. Yes, I do set parts of my books in the present, but it’s the challenge of moving my plots about in history that really excites me. I enjoy bringing disparate events in history together in a way no one could have expected: Winston Churchill’s experience as a POW during the Boer War leads to further adventures and treasure hunting in central Africa, the sinking of the Titanic plays a key role in a WW II scheme by Hitler to steal Europe’s artistic heritage, a Nobel Prize winning scientist before the First World War engages in scientific meddling with genetics during the second.

Much of this passion for history I inherited from my mother, who wrote a series of murder mysteries in the 1960s. But she wasn’t just interested in history. She had an incredibly curious mind and the sciences fascinated her, even though she spent her entire career as a university professor of English. Archaeology, anthropology, astronomy, oceanography and physics all went into the mix. I always felt it gave her books an added dimension and I learned something from each one.

Today, I read about science constantly, just as my mother did so long ago. And I like to think my interests are as wide and varied as hers once were. I’ve crafted entire novels based on a short science article in Science News or the New York Times. It takes only a moment for the mind to see possibilities that take the writer in unexpected directions. Imagination is a powerful and almost mystical tool that can create entire worlds.

If there is one science that absorbed my mother and me the most, it is archaeology. I think this fascination for both of us rose out of the year we lived in Istanbul when I was thirteen. This was when my mother got the idea for the first of her mysteries, entitled Death of a Hittite. During that year we traveled to Ephesus, Troy, and Pergamum and steeped ourselves in the many ancient ruins all across Turkey. I’ve been absorbed by ancient cultures ever since, and they are featured in many of my books.

My readers frequently comment that they are surprised by my imagination and the direction my books take. I consider this the ultimate compliment, for it means the reader will be caught off guard by what happens. My mind seems to expand when I am deep into a book. The possibilities abound. There are no borders or limits save one: to base what happens as close to the possible and believable as I can. If there is science or medicine or history, I try to base it in reality. That is the starting point. Then I allow my mind to wander and the results are always unpredictable—for me as well as the reader.

About Chris Angus

Chris Angus is the award-winning author of several works of nonfiction and a newspaper columnist. He has published more than four hundred essays, articles, book introductions, columns, and reviews in a wide variety of publications, including The New York Times, the Albany Times-Union, Adirondack Life, American Forests, Wordsworth American Classics, Adirondack Explorer, and many more. He also served for ten years as the book review editor for Adirondac magazine. Angus lives in Canton, New York.

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About THE GODS OF LAKI

From the author of FLYPAPER comes an adventure about mysterious underground volcanic forces and a savage plot to alter the Earth’s climate.

A race to unveil the secret of Laki, a volcano on the southern shores of Iceland, pits our heroes—a sixteen-year-old Viking girl from the tenth century, a German geologist from World War II, and a former Secret Service agent protecting a female volcanologist—against evil forces with a plan to cause an eruption using explosives, altering the global climate through the release and forcing the price of oil to skyrocket.

Everyone and everything on Laki is in danger, including the possibility of ever unraveling the mysteries of the place, as it faces burial beneath a carpet of lava flows. Caught underground by the fracturing physical breakup of Laki, everyone finds themselves ensnared by Laki itself—an unseen, implacable foe that seems everything but a benign presence. Every move they make appears to be guided and controlled by an intelligence that permeates the netherworld.

Only gradually, through all the conflict between the various factions, does everyone begin to realize that it is Laki itself that has always been in charge.