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A team of biologists stumbles upon a two-mile-wide crater on an isolated island, and there they discover a whole new world of unprecedented species, including fanged frogs, giant rats, and tree-climbing kangaroos that evolved in isolation over millions of years. It sounds like the plot of my first thriller, Fragment, but it actually happened only three months after the novel hit the stands. A team of biologists from Oxford University, the London Zoo, and the Smithsonian Institution had journeyed into the wilds of Papua New Guinea and lowered themselves into the unexplored Bosavi crater (exactly the same size as Henders Island's crater in Fragment). At the bottom, almost everything they saw was unknown to science, including new birds of paradise, giant monitor lizards, a new species of bat, and 16 new species of frogs .

As Naturalist Steve Backshall said, "It's very much a sealed ecosystem...The crater walls are near vertical and covered in vegetation so it's a very difficult place to penetrate. It did just feel like entering almost like an island, an island surrounded by sea that allows new species to generate at an increased ...

Writing Fragment required a long journey through the real world that would end, eventually, at Henders Island.

While trying to invent life forms as alien as those from another planet, I discovered that imagination is a feeble competitor with Mother Nature. The monsters of the mind can hardly rival what already exists in our own backyards.

Along the varied paths of my research I encountered mindboggling facts about the dynamic forces at play and at war on our planet, and more often than not found that evolution had already invented wilder creatures than I could imagine. My innovations were exposed as imitations, speculations became simulacra, and phantasms mere footnotes on the actual record of life. Writing the book showed me the awesome power and variety of life on Earth, which, through its long and storied history, has been many worlds, both fantastic and unimaginable, vestiges of which survive to this day.

I could not include everything I found during the process of researching Fragment. Therefore, I could not convey how completely reality parallels the fantastic world I was trying to ...