On life extension in science fiction and real life If I was going to bring back an 18th- century lexicographer, hell, I was gonna bring him back. I wasn't going to be held back by notions of what was sensible or good taste. And I suppose I just - I wrote the book to entertain. Johnson is an extraordinary character and a rare creature in literature because he's extraordinarily three-dimensional. On making Samuel Johnson, who died in 1784, a character in his modern-day story And I suppose one of the things I wanted to do in the book was celebrate the act of reading, which is such a mysterious and not sufficiently remarked upon transaction between two consciousnesses, only one of which needs to be alive. Sarah Lee/Courtesy of Farrar, Straus and GirouxДЄnd I think that everyone who loves books has experienced the feeling of being taken over by another mind. Marcel Theroux's other novels include The Confessions Of Mycroft Holmes and A Stranger In The Earth. In other words, that books are alive and that they've got the quintessence of the author inside them. On body swapping as a metaphor for readingД«y setting myself the task of reincarnating someone, I was inspired by John Milton, who has a line in an essay he wrote where he says that books are not absolutely dead things but do contain the essence of the living intellect that bred them. I guess I knew then it wasn't going to be a naturalistic story. I just started with the premise that I wanted someone to come back from the dead and I started thinking about how on Earth that might be possible. And I know there's a certain embarrassment about talking about science fiction in polite company, so some people prefer to call it 'speculative fiction' instead. On the many genres at play in his novel - science fiction, literary fiction, detective fiction, horror fiction

Body swap stories