Ed Lukowich is all about reinvention.
While he made a name for himself in the ’80s and ’90s as a curler and an author of four well known curling books, he has reinvented himself as a science fiction writer with his debut novel “ The Trillionist.”
“It’s about reinventing myself,” said the Calgary based author, who is a cousin of Lethbridge Hurricanes assistant coach Brad Lukowich. He keeps his hand in curling by curling once a week at the Inglewood Curling Club and who just returned from coaching the U.S National team in Fargo, North Dakota.
Lukowich was speaking at the Lethbridge Entertainment Expo, Nov. 23 and Nov. 24 at Exhibition Park.
He noted people are always reinventing their ideas about the universe.
“It started out people thought the world was flat, then that we were the centre of the universe, but Copernicus disproved that,” said Lukowich, who posits the universe is actually much older than the 15 billion or so years it is currently considered to be according to the Big Bang Theory.
He noted new solar systems are constantly being discovered, which make scientists reevaluate their theories. So his theory is it is a trillion years old.
“ I might be right, I might be wrong, but at least I’ll give readers a whole new view,” he said.
So he wrote his first science fiction novel the Trillionist which is named after a word he made up which he defined as “a being or entity who is a trillion years of age.”
The story is about a human who is not born naked and already born with all the knowledge of the universe of having been around for a trillion years,. As a result there are challenges. He tries to make changes which don’t go as planned, then must go back and fix them. While Lukowich doesn’t delve much into the religious/ spiritual implications of a trillion year old universe, there is a “grand artisan” who has designed everything.
“ I never intended to make a lot of money doing this, though nobody chases that away. I just wanted to get my message out there and maybe make people think. Our main goal on Planet Earth is to figure out what the hell we are doing here. And the first step is to figure out how the house is built,” he continued.
The World Champion Curler/ Olympic bronze medalist and two time Brier winner is best known for writing four best selling books about curling including The Curling Book in 1980, Curling to Win in 1986, the Joy of Curling in 1989 and Power Curling in 1990, the last three through McGraw Hill Publishing. He wanted to keep his two careers separate, so gave himself the pen name Sagan (named after scientist/ author/ TV show host Carl Sagan and two cousins who are both named Jeff.
He decided to change direction with “The Trillionist,” published through EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy publishing.
“So I already knew how to write and structure a book. But writing a novel is a whole different thing than writing about curling,” he said adding the Trillionist was also going to be a non-fiction book, though he decided turning it into a novel.
“Originally it was going to be a scientific theory book, but I decided to use the story to explore some of my ideas,” he continued adding he is almost done working on the scientific theory book.
He has always been a voracious consumer of science fiction and science publications as well as a huge fan of Carl Sagan’s well known TV show ‘Cosmos.’
He doesn’t have a scientific background, but did extensive research on hi sown into topics likt the big bang theory and black holes to write the book.. He has degrees in Physical Education and Education with a math major.
If the readers are interested in the theory, the pages have custom QR codes for which they can download an application, which will send them to http://www.trillionist.com/ for in depth explanations of some of the theories.
“This book has been sitting on the shelf for about 15 years because in 2000-2009 I was in the United States with the U.S national curling team,” he said.
The Trillionist is available at Barnes and Noble in the united States, as well as on Amazon and he plans on checking is Chapters is carrying it. Plus it is also available digitally for Kindle.
The next project is the release of his science book in December. The Trillionist was released in October. Later on he plans on writing a sequel to the Trillionist.
