Mind-melting is Crouch’s specialty. His Wayward Pines trilogy of novels was adapted into the 2015–2016 Matt Dillon–Jason Patric series about a strange mountainside town that was impossible to leave. He began Dark Matter around the same time, when he had professional success, but personal doubts. “I mean, it was my midlife sort-of-crisis novel. It is a novel that asks, are you happy with your life? That was a question I was asking myself when I was writing it,” he says. “I was going through a pretty tumultuous moment. It’s my divorce book.”
The solution to such concerns usually can’t be found in a laboratory. But the possibility of simply swapping to a different reality, like changing a pair of clothes, seemed like a way to examine more everyday issues. Crouch became fixated on the possibilities of these speculative researchers.
“Check out Robert Lanza,” he says, referring to the biologist who is a proponent of the biocentrism theory that suggests consciousness manifests reality by reducing infinite possibilities down to one. To put that in Dark Matter terms, the door to the box opens, and the mind determines what’s on the other side. “It’s a little out there and some of it is hard to swallow, but I think a lot of it has the ring of truth to it,” Crouch says.
His science adviser on both the book and the series was Clifford V. Johnson, a professor of theoretical high-energy physics at the University of Southern California. “He helped us design some of the aspects of the box and know how to [explain it,] because the characters talk more about science in the show than they do in the book,” Crouch says. “It was really important to have someone help us not go astray there.”