Local Award-Winning Author Eugene Linden Has A New Sci-Fi Thriller

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Writer Eugene Linden and his new book, Resurrecting Bart

March 4, 2025

By W.B. King–

Following his sci-fi novel Deep Past (2019), author Eugene Linden has picked up where he left off with Resurrecting Bart (2025). The idea for the former book, he told The Hudson Independent, grew out of a ponderance: “If natural selection could produce human scale intelligence in just several hundred thousand years – the blink of an eye on a geological scale – who’s to say other highly intelligent creatures haven’t come and gone over the past millions of years.”

Linden has received numerous accolades, including the Walter Sullivan Award for Excellence in Science Journalism from the American Geophysical Union. Before completing the sci-fi sequel, he was on deadline for another project: in 2022, Fire and Flood: A People’s History of Climate Change, from 1979 to the Present was published. Among glowing reviews was the following from the San Francisco Chronicle: “A detailed account of climate science and policy…Linden is a clear, concise writer. He knows his climate science, and Fire and Flood makes points that stay with you.”

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Deep Past, he shared, drew on decades of his writing about evolution, animal intelligence, climate change and environment and the discovery of ancient, large bones that seemed to have been purposely arrayed. “But by whom, as they were dated to 5.3 million years ago,” he questioned. At the end of the tale, protagonist Claire Knowland accidentally discovers a preserved tooth, setting up the possibility of capturing DNA and bringing back to life this long dead elephant—the crux of Resurrecting Bart. While the title character name was indeed derived from The Simpsons—the answer as to why, Linden said, is in the book.

“I used the elephant because they have long had very large brains and a sophisticated ability to generate and understand sound waves. Their orientation towards sound wave processing allowed me to speculate how selective pressures run amok might produce a species with extraordinary ability to manipulate sounds, he said, adding that it is a key element of both Deep Past and Resurrecting Bart. “I also explore how such an intelligence might be in accord with some aspects of quantum mechanics, rather than the stick and ball model we tend to favor—sorting the world into objects and the forces that act on them.”

Reasons to Turn the Page

A longtime Irvington resident, Linden now resides in Grandview, just across the Hudson River. From 1987 to 1995, the Yale graduate was a senior writer at Time, then a contributor from 1995 until 2001. When asked by The Hudson Independent to describe his writing style, he shared the following insights:

“I studied writing with Robert Penn Warren, who could really break down how subtle changes of perspective and even one particular word could impact a reader’s mind,” he said of Warren who holds the unique distinction of winning a Pulitzer Prize in both fiction and poetry. “But maybe the best advice about writing fiction I ever got was from a novelist friend who said that in non-fiction, a reader will keep going because of interest in the material, but with fiction you have to give a reader a reason to turn the page, every single page.”

In Resurrecting Bart, Linden intends to have readers turn every page continually pondering the following question: Just because we can bring the past back to life, should we?

“A good deal of the book explores how impossibly difficult it would be to give a highly intelligent animal a good and meaningful life given the firestorm of publicity news of the de-extinction of such a creature would engender,” he said, noting that along with his journalist pursuits and research, he spent 21 years on the board of an agricultural biotech company, which provided in-depth exposure to genetics.

“That said, I think a good case can be made for bringing back the ever-growing number of animals whose extinction came at our hands,” he reasoned. “If we killed them off, then they already had passed the tests of natural selection and had some role in maintaining the stability of ecosystems, so de-extinction would be justified under the umbrella of restoring biodiversity.”

Resurrecting Bart: A Deep Past Novel is currently available on Amazon, but Linden will be promoting his latest offering in other mediums as well. “I expect to do some readings in the coming months, but right now I’m going to do a lot of social media,” he said. “Book publishing is a rapidly changing landscape, and I’m trying my best to keep up with the new rules.”

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