TEASER TUESDAY: THE RULE OF KNOWLEDGE BY SCOTT BAKER

Another Teaser Tuesday with a twist … a bonus author interview! I’ve been sent The Rule of Knowledge by Scott Baker by the publisher, who describes Baker’s debut as a novel that has everyone talking; when the Q&A came my way, I decided the best way to highlight the Q&A and the novel at the same time was to use it as a Teaser Tuesday subject. First things first – the teaser.

Finally, text appeared on the screen, ‘END DATA STREAM’, and this was soon replaced by ‘HELLO, WELCOME TO THE LOVE SHACK’.

Gunshot.

And now the blurb and a trailer:

Faith, history, science and love collide in this fast-paced action adventure. High school teacher Shaun Strickland is shocked when he receives a last-minute invitation from Cambridge University to deliver a paper on the relationship between space and time, something he has been studying for years. This could be the break he s been longing for. But as he and his wife drive through the cold North Carolina night to catch their flight, their car slams hard into something exploding from the bushes. From that moment, a mind-bending mystery unravels. A strange package seems to be the key. Breaking the seal, Shaun discovers a bundle of ancient documents written in Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic. But there is something else amongst the pages; a book, seemingly sealed airtight for millennia, written in perfect English, telling a story that will change history. Soon Shaun discovers others are after the book . . . and they won t let anything stand in their way. A debut action thriller that will keep you turning the pages until you have all the answers.

Sound like something you’d read? Read on for the Q&A.

Hachette: Why did you start to write? Tell us about moving from a film career to writing?

Scott: One morning at 4am, I was editing a film trailer for a friend’s novel. He was getting frustrated and complained ‘Making a movie is so much harder than writing a book! If I want ten thousand Inca warriors to storm a Castle, I just write it and it’s done! I don’t have to worry about the weather, how to feed the warriors, build the castle or whether the camera breaks!’ It was an epiphany moment, and so I took the screenplay I had started and turned it into the novel The Rule of Knowledge.

Hachette: Tell us a bit about The Rule of Knowledge. 

Scott: The Rule of Knowledge is an action-adventure throughout history. It’s a cross between Indiana Jones and Back to the Future’  The book asks the question, ‘If you could meet anyone who ever lived, who would it be, and what would you ask them?’

Hachette: So what comes next? Back to the writing desk?

Scott: I have three projects currently in the works. One is an action-Sci fi film called Blue World Order, in which the world is governed by a bio-tech virus, and only one man remains immune. The last chance for mankind is also the last child on Earth, his Daughter. The second film project is the true story of Olympic Taekwondo gold medalist Lauren Burns, and the struggle which took her to the first ever Olympic Gold medal for the sport of TaeKwondo. It’s an amazing cinematic fight fest, kind of like Rocky with spin-kicks! Finally I am writing the next novel – where a man believes that the only way to unite a fractured world is to give them a common enemy … and so fakes an alien invasion of Earth.

Hachette: Were there themes or ideas that you particularly wanted to explore in The Rule of Knowledge?

Scott: There are messages and ideas that are at the heart of The Rule of Knowledge that are far more accessible when wrapped up in an action-packed adventure story. The first is that we don’t necessarily know what we think we know: About history, about what we think we saw, about what we think happened. It tells us that there may always be far more at work than meets the eye. The second is about who you would want to meet and what you would ask them, if you could meet anyone who ever lived. There is so much we have learned in the modern age that would be wonderful to present to the great minds of history. The third is a fundamental change in the time travel genre, and the ‘rules’ of it. Just like Einstein’s theory of relativity fundamentally included the observer within the mechanics of the laws of motion, the ‘Rule of Knowledge’ fundamentally includes the observer in the mechanics of the laws of time travel. Finally, I hope my book helps people treat each other a little better.

Hachette: Who do you like to read? Any favourites? 

Scott: These days I read a lot of non-fiction. I read a lot of science, some biography, and anything I can learn more about the world from. When I was a teenager I read a lot of fantasy – Raymond E Feist, David Eddings and Weiss & Hickman. As I got older I mostly turned to audio books as I spent a lot of time on the road. This led me to more action books – Tom Clancy, Matt Reilly, Michael Crichton.  I do remember a particular book called The Singing Tree by Brian Parvin I read in high school. Don’t know why, but that’s never left my mind …

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Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!