It's just fascinating to me - the things that viruses can do, the adaptations they make. Grant: My interest in disease is a hobby! I read courses at UC Berkley, I attend lectures. SFX: You're not a doctor by profession so where does the interest in epidemiology come into your life? And quarantine would be the only way to handle an outbreak like this, but people are immediately afraid of that solution. We're also afraid of something that you can't stop. So that people now are very afraid of quarantine quarantine is terrifying to most folks. It's a very modern fear in a lot of ways, because we've gone so long now since we've had a real, virulent, airborne, easy-to-catch pandemic. If the disease zombifies your mom then she's not your mom any more. Grant: There's also a fear of identity loss. SFX: Are zombie stories really just about catching something nasty? And that plays very heavily into zombies because zombies are about our fear of infection.
I do a lot of virology and epidemiology study. As I got older I became fascinated with disease. It all fed back into my love of that genre. Mind controlled people, shambling things. I've been a big Doctor Who fan from the time I was three until the present day, too quite a lot of the early Who episodes felt like they had zombie-type creatures in them of one type or another. I was five! It all snowballed from there. Grant: I was attracted to the zombie genre when my parents let me stay up to watch Night Of The Living Dead on cable TV. SFX: And you've always been a fan of the zombie genre then? If there's a political message to the book it's simply this: check several sources and figure out for yourself what's really going on! My book became about media, and what keeps us civilised, and what matters in terms of both things. But news is also something that can very quickly get out of control and start a panic. I was thinking, "What happens in 20 years?" So I set up a functional ecology where we are still faced with the zombie threat but are beating it back and living with it.Īnd the news angle came in from there - TV remains the opium of the masses, news is the most effective control mechanism there is.
I am a zombie fan but all of the zombie stories I've enjoyed started when the dead rose and ended three days later with everybody looking exhausted.
Grant: Initially what I came up with was an ecology book. SFX: What inspired you to write about the zombie apocalypse?
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