Eugene Linden’s New Sci-Fi Thriller Lands Strong Reviews

By W.B. King

Fol­low­ing his sci-fi novel Deep Past (2019), au­thor Eu­gene Lin­den has picked up where he left off with Res­ur­rect­ing Bart (2025). The idea for the for­mer book, he told The Hud­son In­de­pen­dent, grew out of a pon­der­ance: “If nat­ural se­lec­tion could pro­duce hu­man scale in­tel­li­gence in just sev­eral hun­dred thou­sand years – the blink of an eye on a ge­o­log­i­cal scale – who’s to say other highly in­tel­li­gent crea­tures haven’t come and gone over the past mil­lions of years.”

Lin­den has re­ceived nu­mer­ous ac­co­lades, in­clud­ing the Wal­ter Sul­li­van Award for Ex­cel­lence in Sci­ence Jour­nal­ism from the Amer­i­can Geo­phys­i­cal Union. Be­fore com­plet­ing the sci-fi se­quel, he was on dead­line for an­other pro­ject: in 2022, Fire and Flood: A Peo­ple’s His­tory of Cli­mate Change, from 1979 to the Pre­sent was pub­lished. Among glow­ing re­views was the fol­low­ing from the San Fran­cisco Chron­i­cle: “A de­tailed ac­count of cli­mate sci­ence and pol­icy…Lin­den is a clear, con­cise writer. He knows his cli­mate sci­ence, and Fire and Flood makes points that stay with you.”

Deep Past, he shared, drew on decades of his writ­ing about evo­lu­tion, an­i­mal in­tel­li­gence, cli­mate change and en­vi­ron­ment and the dis­cov­ery of an­cient, large bones that seemed to have been pur­posely ar­rayed. “But by whom, as they were dated to 5.3 mil­lion years ago,” he ques­tioned. At the end of the tale, pro­tag­o­nist Claire Know­land ac­ci­den­tally dis­cov­ers a pre­served tooth, set­ting up the pos­si­bil­ity of cap­tur­ing DNA and bring­ing back to life this long dead ele­phant—the crux of Res­ur­rect­ing Bart. While the ti­tle char­ac­ter name was in­deed de­rived from The Simp­sons—the an­swer as to why, Lin­den said, is in the book.

“I used the ele­phant be­cause they have long had very large brains and a so­phis­ti­cated abil­ity to gen­er­ate and un­der­stand sound waves. Their ori­en­ta­tion to­wards sound wave pro­cess­ing al­lowed me to spec­u­late how se­lec­tive pres­sures run amok might pro­duce a species with ex­tra­or­di­nary abil­ity to ma­nip­u­late sounds, he said, adding that it is a key el­e­ment of both Deep Past and Res­ur­rect­ing Bart. “I also ex­plore how such an in­tel­li­gence might be in ac­cord with some as­pects of quan­tum me­chan­ics, rather than the stick and ball model we tend to fa­vor—sort­ing the world into ob­jects and the forces that act on them.”

Rea­sons to Turn the Page

A long­time Irv­ing­ton res­i­dent, Lin­den now re­sides in Grand­view, just across the Hud­son River. From 1987 to 1995, the Yale grad­u­ate was a se­nior writer at Time, then a con­trib­u­tor from 1995 un­til 2001. When asked by The Hud­son In­de­pen­dent to de­scribe his writ­ing style, he shared the fol­low­ing in­sights:

“I stud­ied writ­ing with Robert Penn War­ren, who could re­ally break down how sub­tle changes of per­spec­tive and even one par­tic­u­lar word could im­pact a read­er’s mind,” he said of War­ren who holds the unique dis­tinc­tion of win­ning a Pulitzer Prize in both fic­tion and po­etry. “But maybe the best ad­vice about writ­ing fic­tion I ever got was from a nov­el­ist friend who said that in non-fic­tion, a reader will keep go­ing be­cause of in­ter­est in the ma­te­r­ial, but with fic­tion you have to give a reader a rea­son to turn the page, every sin­gle page.”

In Res­ur­rect­ing Bart, Lin­den in­tends to have read­ers turn every page con­tin­u­ally pon­der­ing the fol­low­ing ques­tion: Just be­cause we can bring the past back to life, should we?

“A good deal of the book ex­plores how im­pos­si­bly dif­fi­cult it would be to give a highly in­tel­li­gent an­i­mal a good and mean­ing­ful life given the firestorm of pub­lic­ity news of the de-ex­tinc­tion of such a crea­ture would en­gen­der,” he said, not­ing that along with his jour­nal­ist pur­suits and re­search, he spent 21 years on the board of an agri­cul­tural biotech com­pany, which pro­vided in-depth ex­po­sure to ge­net­ics.

“That said, I think a good case can be made for bring­ing back the ever-grow­ing num­ber of an­i­mals whose ex­tinc­tion came at our hands,” he rea­soned. “If we killed them off, then they al­ready had passed the tests of nat­ural se­lec­tion and had some role in main­tain­ing the sta­bil­ity of ecosys­tems, so de-ex­tinc­tion would be jus­ti­fied un­der the um­brella of restor­ing bio­di­ver­sity.”

Res­ur­rect­ing Bart: A Deep Past Novel is cur­rently avail­able on Ama­zon, but Lin­den will be pro­mot­ing his lat­est of­fer­ing in other medi­ums as well. “I ex­pect to do some read­ings in the com­ing months, but right now I’m go­ing to do a lot of so­cial me­dia,” he said. “Book pub­lish­ing is a rapidly chang­ing land­scape, and I’m try­ing my best to keep up with the new rules.”

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