One day back in graduate school my advisor, a savvy and successful novelist whose books meant a lot to me and whom I had just traveled three thousand miles to come work with, called me into his office and sat me down sternly. “Look, no offense,” he said, holding up a page of my manuscript, a page so capillaried with red marks it looked like the face of a stroke victim, “but you’ve got to cut it out with these frigging F. Scott Fitzgerald sentences.”

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THE BELIEVER: The first thing that struck me reading The Echo Maker was that it’s filled with a lot of high-level neuroscience, yet the sentences never feel overburdened by the science behind the story. How did you resist the urge to cram the book with all your research?

RICHARD POWERS: The hardest part about doing the research for this book was hitting on an appropriate way to bury it. It takes one hundred billion interconnected cells to conjure up a coherent story of the world. But if neuroscience concludes anything, it’s that sensing and feeling and thinking and perceiving and hundreds of other seemingly separate processes are all conjoined in a huge, dynamic, and continuously revised narrative network. The brain is the ultimate storytelling machine, and consciousness is the ultimate story.

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