Writing Remote Control taught me two lessons. Never underestimate the power of new technology, and clean out your garage more often.
We recently decided to convert the garage in our 103-year-old home into a combination of guest quarters and art studio. In the 42 years we’d lived there, we never once used it to park our cars.
Obtaining our construction permit led to a frenzy of digging through the contents of old boxes. One of them contained printed-out manuscripts from my Hannah Kline series of mysteries. At the very bottom was a novel I’d forgotten about-Remote Control-written in 1997.
In 1996, Computer Motion, a small robotics company based in Santa Barbara, hosted a conference on New Developments in Robotic Surgery. At that time, I was a gynecologic surgeon at Cedars-Sinai, a leading hospital in Los Angeles, and a very early adopter of laparoscopic surgery. I loved trying out new surgical instruments and was curious to see what a robot had to offer.
The conference included an astonishing demonstration. A surgeon, seated at a console, used a robot to sew the ends of two tiny blood vessels together, using a suture the diameter of spider silk. The audience gave him a standing ovation, and I left the conference convinced I’d just seen the newest paradigm in surgical technology.
The conference inspired me to write Remote Control. My agent, who had previously sold my non-fiction book to Penguin, presented the novel to several editors, all of whom rejected it. None of them believed that robotic surgery could exist. I gave up, put the novel in a box, and forgot it for 28 years.
When I rediscovered it, I realized with nine murder mysteries under my belt, I was a more adept writer in 2024 than I had been in 1997. I proceeded to rewrite, work with my developmental editor, and publish it.
I recently read an article in a physics journal about the next step in robotic surgery. Using AI training and sophisticated imaging techniques, scientists have created surgical robots that can perform independently of human supervision and suture far more accurately than any human physician. They are still operating only on animals, but mark my words. It won’t be long until patients enter the hospital to be told, “The robot will see you now.”