Mirror Reversal took decades to conceive.  When Rich Goscicki was studying social psych at NYU in 1966, he was fascinated by the correlation of Lord of the Flies to Freud’s psychoanalytic theory.  Each boy on the island represented a Freudian concept:  ego, superego, id, etc.  He thought of allegorizing another scientific theory but none seemed suitable.  Not much one can do with gravity or relativity. 

After graduating with a BS, he taught biology in NYC private schools and in 1979 the idea was reborn.  Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene rejuvenated the idea.  The gene is the basic unit of life and not the cell.  What if some external event should cause one’s genes to flip, i.e. modest → fast or dove → hawk?  Having been a devotee of narcopharmacologist, Terrence McKenna, all the pieces of the puzzle fell into place and he knew he had the makings of a great story.   

Around 2002, Rich was stricken by an incurable bone disease called Paget’s disease and forced into early retirement.  Seeing the silver lining above the cloud, this gave Rich a chance to devote himself to his writings and his dream of making Mirror Reversal a reality.  Many of the paragraphs of MR were written in extreme pain, as Pagetoid arthritis crippled his fingers so he had to poke individual keystrokes with one finger. 

Goscicki has lived in Sarasota, Florida for the past 15 years.  He spends most of his time studying and writing the fundamentals of his own personal religion which he calls Anti-Supernaturalism.  The main precept of which is that mankind grew out of nature and is part of Gaia.  There is nothing divine or spiritual about it.  Mankind is a product of natural laws.  When it comes to non-kinship-based altruism, humans aren’t even as beneficent or generous as bats or many families of birds.  As long as mankind is locked in the jaws of the Prime Directive (preserve the self while reproducing as much as possible) like every other creature on the planet, mankind has no claim to spirituality.  Humanity is just another opportunist animal, a peculiar ape infected by meme complexes.  Only by curtailing and controlling population growth can we transcend the physical laws that gave rise to us.  As long as any couple can have as many babies as they want—whether they can provide for their litter or not—the human species is no more spiritual than a rapidly dividing bacterium growing on a Petri dish.        

To Goscicki, the closest we come to spirituality is art, especially classical music.  Just as the surface of the water is a clue to a fish that’s there’s a higher dimension, classical music is the membrane that indicates higher realms of human thought and feeling are possible.  Beethoven and Mozart may someday be considered more holy and spiritual than the illiterate zealots that followed Christ.

As Liam the Leprechaun warns in the last chapter, “With religion and superstition so powerful here, it’ll take centuries before humanity can evolve into a spiritual entity.”