Fiona Maazel is the author of Last, Last Chance. Condition of the Show: Considering the niceties of superplagues. Author: Fiona Maazel Subjects Discussed: [List forthcoming] EXCERPT FROM SHOW: Correspondent: If one looks at more lower brow choices, like Stephen King s The Stand or The Andromeda Strain, or any number of superplague television series, like The Survivors and things like that, one tends to find a narrative that begins with the decimation of humanity. Yours is not that particular book. Again, going back to this question of inversions, I m wondering if you made a particular choice. You had to have known about The Stand. Maazel: Sure, it s true. But I didn t think it was an inversion. I thought it was credible actually. I did a lot of research about plague and also about the CDC and bioterrorism. And just how unlikely the scenario I proposed is. It s extraordinarily likely. This isn t an alternate reality kind of novel. It didn t seem likely that someone would unleash a plague and actually wipe out all of humanity. That s just not credible. I wanted to come up with a credible scenario. So I guess from the perspective of someone writing fiction or reading fiction, one might expect something like a terrific slate wiper to come along, as we ve seen in so many of these movies and books. But I actually wanted something that seemed really realistic. That only 3,000 people would die and the fact that they put a stop to it. For instance, when we had this little anthrax outbreak or even bird flu, people are dying, but they re still containing it. I was more interested in the anxiety, the terror, the foreboding of what could happen. Might this thing wipe out a hundred million Americans or a hundred million people? That was more interesting to me than watching this disease tramp across the country and actually kill off half the United States.
