Watch! Author Frank Cottrell Boyce Talks COSMIC with The World Over

Wednesday, 4/14/2010

Cosmic author Frank Cottrell Boyce

Kirkus calls the new novel COSMIC a: “riveting, affecting, sometimes snortingly funny “what-if” scenario that illuminates the realities of space travel as it thoughtfully examines the nature of adulthood… A high-levity zero-gravity romp.”

Cosmic’s author, Frank Cottrell Boyce, recently sat down with The World Over’s Raymond Arroyo to discuss his inspiration for the novel thrill-ride, parenting and his own faith.

In Cosmic, Liam has always felt a bit like he’s stuck between two worlds.  This is primarily due to the fact that he’s a twelve-year-old kid who looks like he’s about thirty. Sometimes it’s not so bad, like when his new principal mistakes him for a teacher on the first day of school. But mostly it’s just frustrating, being a kid trapped in an adult world.

And so he decides to flip things around.

Liam cons his way onto the first spaceship to take civilians into space, a special flight for a group of kids and an adult chaperone, and he is going as the adult chaperone. It’s not long before Liam, along with his friends, is stuck between two worlds again – only this time he’s 239,000 miles from home.

In the interview, Boyce says he got the idea to write Cosmic when thinking about “a boy who looked older than his years. Everything followed from that. The whole space thing – I thought what if you could pass for a grown-up when you were twelve years old? I think all the best stories are about wishes, so what I would have wished for at that age was to go to space. So he went to space.”

When asked about Cosmic’s unique and heartwarming take on fatherhood, Boyce replied: “I think writing the book made me think systematically about being a father. I think nobody ever does that. You just start being a father and take it from minute to minute. And Liam is in this position where he has to sit down and learn from an instruction manual and learn how to do it, which I’ve never done. So it made me meditate and reflect about it [fatherhood]… the book ended up being a kind of love letter from Liam to his dad and from me to my dad.”

Cosmic is in stores now. Browse inside the book with the widget below.

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