An SF Author Strives to Make Our Human Experience More Insightful

Paul Anthony has a serial killer to thank for his day job.

“If it weren’t for the Son of Sam, I wouldn’t have become a doctor!” states the author of An Abundance of Caution via phone from his Queens, New York, home. In 1977, Anthony was a psychology major with “no intention of going to medical school,” he says. When he wasn’t in class, he worked with involuntarily hospitalized children at Brooklyn’s Kings County Hospital Center. Among his duties was taking the children on field trips—until David Berkowitz was apprehended and held in the prison ward just a few floors away. 

When the building went on lockdown, that was the end of the field trips and the beginning of increased anxiety in the young patients. Anthony recalls, “[T]here was a boy who had a broken arm who talked about jumping from a window, there was one hearing voices, one mumbling to himself.” When he saw how medications alleviated many of the children’s symptoms, he changed his major to biology, with an eye toward medical school. However, he never lost sight of those children. The summer of 1977 changed Anthony in more ways than one: Now a board-certified physician and published author, Anthony’s main goal is to “make our human experience on Earth more insightful.”

An Abundance of Caution is the third and final novel in Anthony’s science-fiction trilogy, which chronicles one man’s experience on—and beyond—our home planet. In the novel, lawyer-turned-writer Tobias Sinclair is willingly taken aboard a spaceship of extraterrestrials who have become aware of his extraordinary insights and want to use him as a representative to contact humans on Earth. Once he takes his first step aboard the craft, however, Sinclair starts to doubt his seemingly irreversible decision: 

Tobias began to have second thoughts as he walked up the ramp. He wondered why he had so abruptly, and so willingly, made the decision to leave Earth with the extraterrestrials aboard their spaceship. Was he running away from his life? Was he running away from himself? He was full of doubt and suddenly felt alone….Tobias apprehensively turned and looked back as the retractable ramp and door slid shut behind him, and he realized that he was truly sealed in with the extraterrestrials and the humans who worked with them. 

Ultimately, Sinclair’s personal life starts to interfere with the mission. Although he is a “willing abductee,” Anthony says, “he realizes that he desperately would like to help humanity but would like to heal his family who has been so badly neglected by him.” Sinclair also begins to wonder about his actual purpose in the plan and whether it’s worth being so far away from those he loves.

Though Anthony has published many medical articles throughout his career, he knew science fiction was the perfect—and most accessible—genre for Tobias Sinclair’s story. “I turned to science fiction because of my past experiences with…observing the human condition,” he says. “It dawned on me that we need to look at society in a more well-rounded way. And I felt that I had something to say about our society and our evolution as a species.” Though some authors express similar messages through spiritual or religious literature, Anthony says, “I found that science fiction is a popular medium that will encourage a lot of people from all age groups and all socio-economic levels to become engaged.” 

In the 1980s, Anthony—who, as a Black child in Queens, was bused to a different school as part of the civil rights era’s integration movement—practiced family medicine for one year in Appalachia. “It was a difficult experience, to say the least,” Anthony recalls. “When I would come to New York City, I would be back at home in my regular environment. Then I would go up [to northern Pennsylvania], and I was made painfully aware that I was very different from everyone else.”

Though challenging, the job was also formative—and subsequent work with Latinx and Caribbean populations in different parts of Brooklyn brought Anthony to a stunning revelation. “I realized we all have the same wants and desires and needs,” he says. “Why are people at each other’s throats?” 

An Abundance of Caution, which Kirkus Reviews calls a “skillfully woven story [that] will make readers question why small things cause large wars,” tries to answer that question with the overall theme that “essentially, people are all the same,” Anthony says. Though the message sounds simple in theory, the author acknowledges it can be challenging to put into practice—because, essentially, humans are the same in their instincts.

“I think human beings [are] prone to warfare and fear, that much care must be taken in order to make progress [and] see things in a different way,” Anthony observes. “I think we humans tend not to change, or we have a great deal of resistance when it comes to significant change in our society.” 

However, in his writing and his medical practice, Anthony remains optimistic that people (and whoever else may be out there) can unite to change for the better. “We have to understand to transcend all of our human-made constraints of ethnicity and religion and politics,” he says. “If we rise above and go beyond that, it will enable us to choose the right path.” 

Where, exactly, would this leave us? Simple, Anthony says: “[T]he only thing left would be a common view of humanity.” As Tobias Sinclair discovers in An Abundance of Caution,there’s only one answer to all societal issues.

“The Beatles were right,” Anthony says, laughing. “All you need is love.”

Lauren Emily Whalen is the author of four books for young adults. She lives in Chicago.