While acting on my longstanding desire to write a play about Nicolaus Copernicus, I visited Poland three times and conducted enough research to fill a book. The play at the book’s heart, “And the Sun Stood Still,” portrays the people and events pushing Copernicus to publish his rearrangement of the cosmos.
The nonfiction narrative surrounding the play tells the facts of his life story and traces the impact of his seminal work, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, to the present day.
Copies of Copernicus’s book currently sell for several million dollars at auction. As for my book, readers who prefer a strictly historical account may simply skip over the play. In fact, I almost wish they would, as I’ve since improved the script, which Bloomsbury published in a new stand-alone edition in 2016.