All novels, especially first novels, are autobiographical at some level, so how did a research scientist and writer pen a psycho-sexual thriller?

In the above video John Casti answers just that question in an interview with Roger Jones the Co-Founder of  The X-Press.

Dr. Casti received his Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of Southern California. He worked at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, CA, and served as a professor at Princeton and New York University in the USA before becoming one of the first members of the research staff at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Vienna, Austria. He has also been on the faculty of the Technical University of Vienna and the Santa Fe Institute in the USA.

He has published eight technical monographs in the area of system theory and mathematical modeling, as well as 12 volumes of popular science, including Paradigms Lost, Complexification, Would-Be Worlds, The Cambridge Quintet, and Mood Matters. His 2012 book, XEVENTS addresses the role complexity overload plays in the creation of potentially life-changing events such as the crash of the Internet or the outbreak of a global pandemic.

Dr. Casti is currently Director of The X-Center, a private research institute in Vienna focusing on the development of tools for anticipation of extreme events in human society. He is also a Founding Member of The Global X-Network, a society devoted to developing tools for understanding how complex interactions drive the behavior of social processes, as well as how to make such systems more resilient to unpredictable outside forces.

Following his retirement from academia, Casti’s writing now focuses on fiction. His books Prey for Me (2020) and Jemini (2023) are the initial fruits of this venture.