The Story Behind This Book

Q: Where did you come up with the idea for this novel?

A: I had not one, but two main sources of inspiration for Lazaurus Man: Resurrection.

The first was an email I received a few years ago that described life in the United States in 1907 and pointed out how much things have changed in the last century. (In 1907, the population of Las Vegas was 30, life expectancy in the U.S. was 47 years, the average wage was 22 cents an hour, there were only 144 miles of paved roads in the entire nation, only 18% of households had a bathtub, and women washed their hair once a month using borax soap or egg yolks!) And that started me thinking: if the world transformed that much in the last 100 years, with things changing now at what seems an almost logarithmic pace, what will the U.S.—and the world—be like in another century?

The second thing that inspired me was the memory of a TV show I remember watching when I was in elementary school in the 1960s. The series was called The Second Hundred Years and starred Monte Markham and Arthur O’Connell. It was about a man in his thirties who fell into a glacier and was subsequently frozen in the early 1900s. Sixty years later, he is found, thawed, and revived, and hasn´t aged a day since he was frozen. When he is reunited with his family, he discovers that his son is now a senior citizen and his grandson is the same age he is. I was always intrigued by this storyline and fascinated by the realization that, from the protagonist’s point of view, this experience would be essentially the same as time traveling sixty years into the future.