Cary Baird asked Lawrence Wright:

I have read several of your books, and they were all non-fiction. I absolutely loved The Looming Tower and have been impressed by your research and detail. Was it difficult to write a fiction book, and how was your process different (if at all)? And, are you surprised by our current lack of preparation and inability to accurately assess the impacts of the Corona virus? What should change?

Lawrence Wright Every book has its own unique challenges. The fact that this was fiction was only one of them. There was a lot of research to be done. I'm not a scientist and certainly not a doctor, so I had to understand the medicine. That required a lot of reading, but also recruiting experts who would teach me what I needed to know and keep me from making colossal mistakes. Some of them are on the front lines right now of creating a vaccine. They knew we would be facing a pandemic like this, they just didn't know when. So it's dismaying to realize that there was all this knowledge out there and our government failed to heed the experts.

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