Jeff Carlson’s debut thriller Plague Year gives you a Rocky Mountain High you’ve never had before – namely, if you find yourself below 10,000 feet in altitude, you’ll die. Horribly. Painfully. Ickily. Which makes those demises gruesome fun to read – although, alas for the characters in the book, not so much fun to experience. It’s a new take on the possible end of the world, or at least one with humanity in it.
What possessed Carlson to such high-altitude horror? In this installment of The Big Idea, Carlson explains that it began with a ski trip… and from there it was just a hop skip and a jump to worldwide apocalyspe.
All I can say is, well, that must have been on hell of a ski trip.
Jeff Carlson:
The concept behind Plague Year was literally developed from the top down. I’m a lifelong snow skier and backpacker, and as a writer I’m always on the hunt for cool ideas. My friends and I had just had a spectacular day among the cliffs and trees of our local ski resort. Unfortunately it was time to leave. Everyone needed to be at work the next morning and I thought, “What if we couldn’t go home again?” We’d been snowed in before, but I started to think, “What if we could never go home?”
It was a new way of looking at the planet and I was fascinated by the challenges it presented. Life gets ugly in a hurry if the environment below 10,000 feet is suddenly and forever lethal. Mountaintops become islands. It would be as if the continents shrunk and in fact disappeared almost completely.
Major themes in Plague Year are isolation, sacrifice, and redemption. What costs would you accept just to stay alive? My heroes are good people, though profoundly wounded. They’re trying their best to hold things together but they’re dealing with conflict from every direction, both external and internal, from the large-scale civil war across the Rockies to the very personal struggle for survival among the smallest dots of safe ground in California.
And yet that wasn’t enough. I wanted the book to be more than just action and mayhem. It adds an entirely new layer of suspense if the characters have some chance at reversing the situation, no matter how impossible.
In an early version of the story, the problem was a virus, but for one thing, I couldn’t make a biological threat obey a barrier. It kept coming up over the mountains and killing everybody. There’s a book in that, too, of course, but it would be one without any hope at all, whereas if the danger was a machine plague it might have limits. You might even be able to turn it off. So I began to toy around with nanotech.
Researchers are publishing a lot of mind-croggling stuff in medical technology these days and I was especially interested in how they’re using primitive nanobots to target and destroy tumors. The prototype that gets loose in Plague Year is 100% real, given a single breakthrough… and there are hundreds of private labs that aren’t publishing. Nobody knows how far they’ve moved ahead of the rest of the field.
Once I figured out that part of the puzzle, the story took off. Mass extinction is interesting. World war is interesting. But it’s the individual effort and intelligence of the two main characters that really drive the book.
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Visit Jeff Carlson on the Web. And check out the first chapter of Plague Year online here.
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