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My original working title was actually Enola Spelled Backwards, which was a nod to the Enola Gay. I thought it was fascinating that Paul Tibbets, the pilot who flew the aircraft that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, named the plane after his mother Enola, who was named for the titular character in the novel Enola: Or Her Fatal Mistake, by Mary Young Ridenbaugh. I loved the self-fulfilling prophecy in that name; when it was reflected in the water over the Pacific, the nose of the plane would spell out the word alone. That’s why I also wrote the storyline of my Japanese character, a Hibakusha who has survived the bomb and must suffer its consequences, in reverse. Through his eyes, we time travel backwards, beginning with the toll the bomb has taken on his world by the end of his life, all the way back to its horrific inception.
In the end, we landed on the title, The Sound of a Thousand Stars, because it connected thematically. I liked that it was a nod to Fred J. Olivi’s famous words on the evening news after the bombing of Nagasaki: “Suddenly, the light of a thousand suns illuminated the cockpit.” It’s also apt because it’s a nod to understanding the world through numbers, and the book is inspired by my grandfather, who was always solving math riddles and quizzing us on square roots. Finally, it’s a paradox. Because there’s no...[read on]
The Page 69 Test: The Sound of a Thousand Stars.
Q&A with Rachel Robbins.
--Marshal Zeringue
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