The Big Idea: Nancy Kress
Posted on July 1, 2008 Posted by John Scalzi 15 Comments
Your sweet adorable pet: What if it was a raging vector of viral infection? Maybe that’s not something you actually want to spend time thinking about, but that’s okay, since Hugo and Nebula Award winning author Nancy Kress already thought about it for you. The result: Dogs, which Publishers Weekly is lauding as “a spine-chilling, suspense-laden story,” featuring Man’s Best Friend becoming a whole lot less friendly.
Why did Kress think of this in the first place? Well, like some viruses one can think of, this story had a long incubation period. Here’s the author to trace the vector of infection back to the source.
NANCY KRESS:
In 1998, four years after it first came out, I read Richard Preston’s non-fiction bestseller, The Hot Zone, which harrowingly details the importation of monkeys infected with Ebola into the United States. The monkeys were housed in an animal holding facility in Reston, Virginia, destined for research by pharmaceutical companies, when they began to die with the characteristic, horrifying “bleeding out” of Ebola. Both the CDC and USAMRIID, the United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases, were called in to deal with the crisis. All the monkeys were destroyed.
I was riveted. Genetic engineering had already begun to take firm hold of my writing, both as potential benefit and as potentially monstrous bioweapon. But now I expanded that interest to naturally occurring pathogens that could be just as deadly. What if Ebola in its most dangerous form had been transmitted to monkey-house workers? What if it had gotten out into the general population?
Some novels have a long gestation period. Over the next five years, the topic didn’t leave my mind. I knew I wanted to write about an animal-carried plague, but I didn’t want the bubonic-plague model, in which fleas on rats carry the disease but aren’t much affected themselves. Then avian-flu broke out in Asia. This was closer to what I wanted; chickens could both become infected and infect humans, although only if humans had close, prolonged contact with the chickens. More interesting to me was the response of various Asian governments: quarantine and destroy the birds. But some element was missing in my mind.
It was supplied by both 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina.
The attack on the World Trade Towers, which so sharply clarified the bitterness of Arab jihadists for the United States, profoundly discouraged me. When young, I’d lived for a year in an Arab country (Tunisia) and had developed a liking for Arab culture, as well as a respect for the complicated, tangled ways that family, business, politics, and religion mesh in that part of the world. It’s utterly different from the way things get accomplished in the United States. I knew I couldn’t write about it from an Arab point of view, but I wanted now to write about it in some way.
Hurricane Katrina dismayed everyone with how badly FEMA handled the crisis. I read the angry, post-hurricane interviews with people who had been badly let down by a flat-footed government more interested in its own prestige than it protecting its citizens.
Then, in 2003, I got a dog.
Who can say how disparate elements finally, after years of simmering in the well of unconscious, come together in a writer’s brain? All at once I saw how a biological pathogen, a government’s ineptitude in the face of emergency, and a person involved with Arab culture, could come together in my book. The novel’s heroine Tessa Sanderson Mahjoub is not an Arab; she is the widow of one. Dogs can carry viruses that make them profoundly dangerous to human beings, not because diseases easily jump species barriers (they don’t) but because retroviruses like rabies can cross the blood-brain barrier and change canine behavior. Thirty-five million American households harbor 65 million dogs. How would the United States government respond to a plague among domestic dogs?
Just as important, how would dog owners, pretty fanatic people themselves, respond to interference with their beloved pets? Spot and Max and Cosette are not regarded in anything close to the same way as medical-research monkeys or Asian chickens.
In working out the plot of Dogs, I wanted to present all sides of the complex issues involved, the chief of which is the good of the majority versus the rights of the individual. In any real plague situation, that’s the conflict that will surface. I’m not sure we’ll handle it particularly well. Dogs, like much SF, is a sort of rehearsal for how that crisis might go down.
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Dogs: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Powell’s
Read Nancy Kress’ blog here. And participate the Dogs photo contest here: three winners will receive a prize package which includes a signed copy of Dogs.
I’m definitely reading this book! Thank you for the look at the “mental hopscotch” that led this writer dow the path from inklings to full-blown concept–it’s fascinating to hear (read!) how the process works for others.
You know, this “The Big Idea” thing of yours is costing me a lot of money.
On the upside, I always have a good list of reliably entertaining fiction for my trips to the bookstore.
Marko:
“You know, this ‘The Big Idea’ thing of yours is costing me a lot of money.”
Yes, well. It’s sort of the point.
A fascinating and frightening idea. I’ve always loved Nancy’s writing so this will go on the buy list.
I used to try to read her blog but that white on black just makes my eyes bleed.
This book sounds downright disturbing. I’ll be putting it on my wish list.
Aside from the fun sciency stuff which Kress does very nicely, I think she has a special way with her characters and a realism to their emotions/motivations that is always a pleasure to read. Sometimes this is not the forte of a Science Fiction Author and while that’s an Asimovian “Science Fiction fans just want these crazy stories” discussion for another time, it’s generally true (for me, at least) if Kress gets ahold of something it’s almost always a good ride.
A new Nancy Kress novel! Hooray!
On top of all the things Nancy mentioned, consider how horrified American pet owners were when contaminated pet food was distributed. Or FEMA in NOLA not letting Americans take members of their family in evacuations who didn’t happen to be upright bipedal types.
Thanks, Nancy. (grin)
Dr. Phil
For the first time since you started The Big Idea, I ran out and bought the book in question.
@Nancy retroviruses like rabies
Microbiology quibble: rabies virus has an RNA genome, but the viral life cycle does not involve a DNA intermediate, which is the hallmark of retroviruses.
Wow, I can’t wait to read this one. I always enjoy Kress’s work, and this one sounds a) fantastic and b) disturbing.
Sounds interesting , I wonder though if she is familiar with http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0352547/combined “Mad Dogs” The plague is just a background element in that movie. I’m pretty sure the main plot of the novel is not related to the plot of that movie. That plot was more about the relationship between man and god then man and dog.
I love Nancy Kress’s work. Her Beggars from Spain “trilogy” is a high mark of SF. (I put quotes because I’m not sure she started out wanting to do 3.)
I think Warren Ellis would find your new book very interesting!
http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=6044
Heh-heh.
JerolJ: Read the RSS feed instead of the web page, then you won’t get any weird color combos, methinks. (At least, I don’t.)
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