The Quy Effect

Picaresque, happy ending. Marvelous character sketches from main to comprimarios to minors.

The Quy Effect is an anti-gravitic Meissner Effect analogue exhibited by a novel room-temperature organic superconductor developed by a lone maverick inventor. As the novel opens our hero, a ne’er-do-well basement tinkerer in his 70s, has made his discovery blowing up his employer’s factory and has been summarily fired and black-listed.

But the Quy Effect is not only the scientific discovery, it is Quy’s effect on his family, his friends, and the world. It is the effect that a maverick lone dreamer can still have in a world of science that has become bureaucracy and teams. It is Caractacus Pott - Crackpot - contra the mundane.

Unlike Fleming’s charming fable, there is no Evil in this story. There is opposition, and threat and danger, but it is all from simple human conflicts of interest, from pettiness, selfishness, short-sightedness, lack of vision and imagination, fear, self-doubt, self-absorption; and not from the opposition only: our hero creates his own problems by his own stubbornness, self-absorption, and selfish focus on what is essentially an artistic drive, tho’ his field is industrial and scientific. Against these are arrayed good-nature, kindness, and caring.

It is a book about fathers and sons: the relationships among Quy, his son Preston who worshipped him and whom he rejected to keep him from following in his maverick footsteps, and his grandson Alan, who also worships him, and from whose influence his father wishes to protect him are briefly but beautifully presented.

And there are redemption, and reconciliation, and understanding, and self-understanding.

The finale is an acknowledgement that teams are necessary for large projects and a plea for human-scale committees, small and unencumbered by self-protective procedures, energized by pride and commitment. (And I believe that NASA achieved that, with a third of a million participants; as great a feat as the engineering and scientific achievements.)