The Real Life of a Fictional Character

Dutch money, pre Euro, with Christiaan Huygens.

I recently published the third and final book in my Ace Adler trilogy. It was a bittersweet ending to three years of living in Ace’s world, writing about time travel, sadness, and growing up. One character that spanned all three books was Christiaan Huygens. My version of him was fictional, a seventeenth century scientist and scholar who was a time traveler.

But, Huygens was real.

He was a contemporary of Isaac Newton but his name, at least in the U.S., is not as known as Sir Isaac’s, or at all, really. Newton got the apple falling from the tree story to immortalize him in grade school science lessons. Though well known in the Netherlands, Huygens remains a footnote here.

If you read about him you might wonder why he isn’t as known, aside from the fact his name is near impossible for English speakers to pronounce (at least for me). He invented the pendulum clock, the reason he is a part of my fictional time travel world, which revolutionized timekeeping for years. As an astronomer, he discovered Titan, the first, and largest, moon of Saturn. He was a member of the Royal Society along with Newton and other scientific scholars, an organization that continues today.

I found myself drawn to his character, and his real life. Last summer, between writing the second and final books, I got to visit Huygens home in the Netherlands, a beatiful home that comes up out of a lake with a bridge connecting it to land. In his day it was considered a modest country home, but walking through it I felt like I was in a fantasy world.

When finished with the writing of the third book, I passed a printed manuscript to my editor to give me the red pen treatment. When I received it back, I, as always, went page by page to review her notes and make changes throughout. I reached the final page and inside the back cover of the spiral bound manuscript was taped a gift from my editor: a pristine example of the Dutch banknote that featured Huygens face. This is who he was, and is, in the Netherlands. He is a name taught in schools, whose family home is now a museum.

The money is currently between the pages of a beautiful book about his family I bought at his museum, but I plan to one day frame it to hang above my desk.