Saleh R Shahid was born in Dorchester, Mass to a Pakistani father and American mother. He grew up in the 70’s and 80’s in Brockton, Mass. He attended U. South Florida for undergraduate studies and earned his M.D. from St. George U. in Grenada, West Indies. He lives in Knoxville, TN with Paula, his wife of 25 years. They have three children.
Dr. Shahid practices Internal Medicine, a broad field for someone with many interests. His approach to life has been the same—like a kid in an amusement park with too many rides and never enough time. His creative pursuits have spanned several arts, including music, acting, painting and writing. In reading The Physics of Why, you might see that mindset shine through.
TBE: The novel weaves together multiple timelines and stories—from 16th-century India to a far future in space. What inspired you to connect these seemingly disparate periods through the concept of Why Waves and reincarnation?
Saleh R Shahid: It was a revelation that smacked me in the head—a sudden coalescing of my fears, wants and experiences into a story. As an aging man, I fear, like most of us, death, and the possibility of never again seeing the people I love. I pray to live again, to know that I have a soul that will survive.
A significant contribution came from a few things I learned from Dr. Bruce Lipton. A world-famous epigeneticist, he was my professor in med school and is the author of The Biology of Belief. He taught me that life tends to be redundant; that we all are, on a quantum level, simply energy; that we use our pineal glands to communicate that energy; and that love is a very real, physical thing.
TBE: The character of Aisha is portrayed with remarkable depth for a teenage girl in Mughal India. What research did you do to capture the perspective of a young Muslim noblewoman from that era? How did you balance historical accuracy with making her relatable to modern readers?
Saleh R Shahid: No research; I just made her up. I am Muslim and Pakistani, so I have known women of that faith and from that region. It’s not a balance; it’s a blend. There are things about people that permeate the ages: the survival instinct, a love of animals, fear, guilt, boys, menses. I just took universal concepts and worked them into an exotic situation. A good example is when she was confronted by an enemy about her father’s role in the war and thus her culpability. She responded, as any teenage girl would, “But I don’t care about politics.”
TBE: Your depiction of the Asmat people and their customs is quite detailed. What drew you to include this indigenous culture in the story? How did you approach writing about their spiritual practices and beliefs?
Saleh R Shahid: All of the major characters in this book share something in common with me. Dustin Nye is a fish out of water, trying to find his tribe. He tries to fit in with, or at least be accepted by, increasingly foreign people—first his classmates, then women, then hippies, and ultimately the strangest people in the furthest possible corner of the world. And indigenous folk in far-off lands make for great adventure.
Writing about the spiritual practices of the Asmat people, at least superficially, is easy once you learn them. The spirit world is involved in everything they do, from carving a bowl to walking in the woods. Writing about them without the spirit world would be like making tea without water. Of course, their most important practice, the Ghost Listening, was entirely fictional.
An overarching theme of The Physics of Why is the reconciliation of Eastern and Western ideas. The Asmat beliefs, having been largely influenced by Catholic missionaries, fits nicely. This is nowhere better demonstrated when their shaman is asked if he talks to ghosts. “We all talk to them,” Yopokay replies. “The ghosts of our ancestors, the ghosts of the forests, and the Holy Ghost.”
TBE: The novel explores different manifestations of love, from Aisha and Sunny’s innocent romance to Dr. Nye’s complex relationship with Anna to Captain Younas’s eventual spiritual awakening. Was this examination of love’s many forms intentional? What were you hoping to convey?
Saleh R Shahid: Several things. First, that the Western concept of different forms of love is nonsense. Nobody said it better than Sunny. “These other things—romance and motherly instinct, the bond of brothers, and the bond of veterans—these are ornaments for love. They are not love itself.”
Second, to quote my own mother, “being in love is a state of temporary insanity.” That is why Dustin turned out to be <spoiler alert>, Aisha’s monkey, not her husband. Aisha and Sunny had puppy love, not true love. Aisha and her monkey, on the other hand, spent years together, grew up together, and did everything together. They also shared the experience of having lost parents.
Third, love and morality are intertwined. In all three stories, she (Aisha, Anna, Mary) remain solid and constant, whereas he declines from an innocent, religious monkey to an agnostic, arrogant sellout, and ultimately to a despicable libertine. Concomitantly, their relationship decays from love to hatred.
TBE: The Melons on Planet Susan are a fascinating alien species. What inspired their unique form of communication through color changes? How did you develop their society and biology?
Saleh R Shahid: I don’t remember when I first thought of it, but I had the idea, long before this book, that an alien species might not communicate by any means that we can detect or conceive. From there, I used my imagination. I can’t remember how I first came up with their form and nature, but I knew they had to have learned space travel in order to catch the attention of our heroes.
I also wanted them to be somewhat cute and comical. Hence the absurd catapult. From those desires, I worked backwards, trying to account, as logically as I could, how they might appear, function, survive, and how they might have evolved.
As in many other parts of the book, I left large logic gaps to be filled in by the reader’s imagination. The Physics of Why is by no means hard sci-fi or totally soft, but fluctuates somewhere in between.
TBE: Throughout the book, characters struggle with moral choices and questions of justice vs revenge. This is especially evident in Dr. Money’s story arc. What made you want to explore these ethical dilemmas?
Saleh R Shahid: I’m not sure I would describe her quandary that way at all. She is forced to decide between, on one side, her integrity and her duty to her patient, and on the other, the need to right a great injustice.
To me, this book is a collection of all the things worth writing about. That includes battles with one’s inner goblins, as well as with tyrants and scoundrels.
TBE: The scientific concepts in the book, particularly around Why Waves, feel grounded despite being speculative. What real scientific theories or discoveries influenced your worldbuilding?
Saleh R Shahid: The wave-particle duality of nature was certainly one, as I alluded to in a previous question. Another related pearl that I learned from Dr. Lipton was that, on a subatomic level, things don’t actually contact; rather, their fields interact. For example, cell receptors and their ligands don’t actually work, as I had previously thought, mechanically like lock and key. Instead, their fields (as best I understand) communicate somewhat like a key fob. That inspired the idea for the “radiofrequency toxin”—the gadget that Mrs. Sparrow used to kill Baldric Silver.
Of course, the theories of wormholes and the malleability of time played roles in the story.
TBE: The ending brings an interesting spiritual dimension to what started as hard science fiction. What led you to incorporate angels and religious themes into the conclusion? How do you see this fitting with the earlier scientific focus?
Saleh R Shahid: The book doesn’t start with hard science. It starts with a symbolic marriage of a Muslim with a Hindu, in keeping with the East meets West theme. The entire book attempts to blend and reconcile religion and science as realities that are complimentary and harmonious. Examples range from the fictional Asmat rituals, which make use of Why Waves, to Younas’ final mission—a journey to where the Waves are suspected to originate, a place he suspects to be heaven. Younas himself is named after a Biblical prophet.
TBE: Many of your characters are deeply flawed but ultimately sympathetic. This is especially true of Captain Younas. How did you approach writing his transformation from an unlikeable character to one seeking redemption?
Saleh R Shahid: A recurring feature of the book is the journey. Aisha and Sunny across India journeyed for love, Dustin across the world for understanding, and I knew from the start that Younas would journey across the universe for redemption, whether that was his intention or not. I also knew he would do it alone, isolated, repenting in the belly of a beast, which is the reason for his name. Younas is the Arabic name for Jonah, the Prophet of the Bible and Quran who underwent a similar ordeal.
TBE: The book touches on themes of colonialism, both historical and future interplanetary. Was this parallel intentional? What made you want to explore these power dynamics across different time periods?
Saleh R Shahid: I actually think the story of Dustin (in the present) most closely resembles the practice of colonialism in the manner that the term is commonly used, i.e., the seizure and exploitation of a weak and small nation by an empire. The Asmat people were colonized by the Dutch, exploited personally by Dustin, and eventually by the world. “…and foreigners will once again descend on the Asmats to take their stuff.”
I don’t think of colonialism when considering the situations in the future novella, where the worlds were previously lifeless. I think of tyranny, from the totalitarian government of Dundo, to the merciless corporate rule on Argos, to the forced abortions on Annabelle. This resonates nicely with the first novella, for both Akbar and Rana Pratap were tyrants in their own ways. Having grown up as an American in the Cold War, and in the wake of World War II, the danger of tyranny was a persistent spectre, and its contrast with liberty was stark.
TBE: While the book follows multiple plots, they all seem to explore connection – between people, between past and future lives, between science and spirituality. What drew you to this theme of interconnection?
Saleh R Shahid: The connection between science and religion was immediately apparent when I first became a biology major. The honest study of biology, and of medicine afterwards is a years-long revelation that life was created. All life, right down to the most basic bacterium, is technology so advanced and complex that it is incomprehensible. DNA, for example, is coding. There can be no code without a coder.
I also grew up in America with an American mother and Pakistani father, at a time when nobody ever heard of Pakistan. This meant a lot of cultural clashing, which requires a child to integrate and adjust, or suffer. Thus, the reconciliation of Eastern and Western concepts of science and religion became the dominant theme of the book.
TBE: The pacing shifts dramatically between intimate character moments and sweeping sci-fi adventure. How did you approach structuring these different narrative modes? What were the challenges in maintaining flow between them?
Saleh R Shahid: I would love to claim that methodical planning was involved in any structure that you perceive. There was indeed a lot of story-boarding that went into the macroscopic structure of the book. However, as for the shifts that you describe, I relied on art and instinct more than skill. I hope it worked well.
