THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, JUNE 29, 2020 N C3LONDON — For two years, Naomi Alderman,
the author of the 2017 dystopian novel “The
Power,” had been working on her next book.
Then in February, with 40,000 words al-
ready written, she decided she had to stop.
The story she had devised, about tech bil-
lionaires fleeing a pandemic, now seemed a
little too close to reality.
“I just thought, ‘Bollocks! I am not going
to be able to write this book,’ ” Alderman
said in a phone interview. “It just felt incred-
ibly disrespectful to the many people who
had lost loved ones. And I thought, ‘God
knows where this pandemic is going to land,
and what is possibly going to be the world
that comes after it.’ ”
In her book, tentatively titled “The Sur-
vivals,” she had conjured a pandemic that
was much worse than the coronavirus.
“News services called it pigeon flu,” one
passage of the draft went, “because for a
while they thought that the rapid spread of
the illness was caused by pigeons. In Paris,
there was a series of photographs of local
militia using flame throwers against the pi-
geons. In the images, the birds are trying to
fly, their wings on fire. They look like they
are screaming, gouts of flame.”
For weeks, Alderman didn’t touch the
book, focusing instead on writing exercises.
She eventually reconsidered and has de-
cided she can finish it, but with potentially a
lot of changes. Likely to be left on the cut-
ting-room floor is the first third of the novel,
which explained what a pandemic was and
gave the emotional kick so people realized
just how scary they are. “That might end up
being summarized in about two sentences,”
she said with a laugh.
In the interview, she talked about how
she shifted course with the book, whether
novelists should incorporate the coro-
navirus into their fiction and why it’s per-
haps time for science fiction writers to be
kinder. These are edited excerpts from the
conversation.How did you come to write about a pan-
demic in the first place?
I’m interested in what people do in extreme
situations. I’d read a piece in The New
Yorker about technology billionaires in-
vesting in bunkers in New Zealand in order
to survive any breakdown of society that
they may themselves have ended up cata-
lyzing or causing. That struck me as ex-
tremely fertile territory, the massive gap
between the rhetoric of Silicon Valley and
the reality.
It also seemed to me that we were due for
a pandemic. They come along roughly once
every 100 years or so, and the last was the
1918/19 one. So I sort of put these two things
together: What if I were to follow these tech
billionaires on their attempts to get to their
bunker?
I did not anticipate this would actually
happen.You heard about coronavirus in January.
How did that affect your writing at first?
In the draft, I had a pandemic starting in
South America. And when I saw this break-
ing out in China, I thought, “Ooh, why don’t I
change it to there?” So for probably Janu-ary, much of February, I thought, “This is
very topical. This is great. When people
come to read this, they’ll go, ‘Oh, she’s look-
ing at what’d have happened if that small
pandemic got out of control.’ ” Then by mid-
February, I was just thinking, “Oh dear.”So what made you feel able
to come back to it?
In mid-April, I suddenly had a thought that
although Covid is not fun, by the scale of
plagues, it is actually quite kind. We forget
that it’s perfectly possible for a plague to
disproportionately kill babies, or children.
So I thought, “How about if this book is writ-
ten in a world after Covid, 10 or 15 years lat-
er, and what I’m writing about is a much less
kind plague?”
It also seemed to me it would be very use-
ful, and enjoyable and rewarding, to try to
think about what a world after Covid might
be like, and what should be different in or-
der to help it be better.
So that’s how I’m looking at it. But I would
say that the book is still in flux, which I think
one has to allow when it’s suffered a bit of a
blow to the head as this has.What did you get right and wrong
about the pandemic?
I got the YouTube videos right. In my novel,
people find out about what’s happening
around the world not so much from the
news as from people uploading videos. I
also got the feeling of panic right, I think.And I did have a horrifically, surprisingly
accurate bit where things go very, very bad
in Italy, and the trains are being turned back
and the hospitals get overwhelmed.
What I found surprising is how tiring it is.
I’ve compared it in my mind to the experi-
ence of moving to a foreign country where
you’ve got to relearn everything: how to an-
swer the door, how to walk down the street,
how to get your groceries. There’s a perva-
sive internet fantasy that we’re all going to
use this time to become proficient in a new
language and perfect our archery skills.The Guardian published an article this
month featuring authors discussing whether
they should change their books to include
things like face masks or remove scenes
where their characters are in pubs. What
would your advice to them be?
Don’t stress. Or set it in 2017. Or 2023.
If you’re writing a novel where the main
character runs a chain of pubs, and the
whole plot concerns his ability to keep his
chain of pubs afloat, and you very much
want it to be contemporary realist, you
might have to really get into social-distanc-
ing rules. But if you have characters meet-
ing incidentally in a pub, that’s going to
come back.
At the start of Dickens’s “Little Dorrit,” a
group of characters are saying farewell to
each other. Why have they been acquainted
for the past two or three weeks? Because
they were all in quarantine, having comeback from Europe where there was an out-
break of a disease. And Dickens never gets
into what the rules on social distancing
were or how exactly they got into that quar-
antine or how they were housed. It’s just,
“Well that happened, so let’s now push on
with the story.” That seems a very good
model.As someone who spends her time envision-
ing the future, can you see this having any
impact on science fiction?
It’s not going to have an effect on the kind of
deep future, sci-fi space operas with alien
invasions and spaceships. But I think for
the social science fiction, it might. There’s a
strand of apocalyptic science fiction which
seems to imagine that most people are just
waiting for an excuse to become a cannibal.
[Cormac McCarthy’s] “The Road” is a very,
very good book, but I do not actually think it
is true that what most of us are going to do if
the world goes nuts is go, “Hurrah, a chance
at long last to fulfill my ambition to eat hu-
man flesh!” That’s not how human beings
have survived the past several million
years. How we’ve actually survived is by
working together, forming into communi-
ties, working out how to trade with others,
mostly trying to keep the peace.And that’s true even for the tech billionaires
in your book?
Well, I think tech billionaires are a very par-
ticular subset of humanity.Naomi Alderman
was writing a novel
about a fictional
plague. Then came
the coronavirus, and
at first she couldn’t
touch the book.
“Don’t stress,” Naomi
Alderman advises writers. ““If
you have characters meeting
incidentally in a pub, that’s
going to come back.”
ANNABEL MOELLERWhen Reality Overtakes Science Fiction
By ALEX MARSHALLFill the grid with digits so as not to repeat a digit in any row or column, and so that the digits within each
heavily outlined box will produce the target number shown, by using addition, subtraction, multiplication or
division, as indicated in the box. A 4x4 grid will use the digits 1-4. A 6x6 grid will use 1-6.
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Put two stars in each row, column and region of the grid. No two stars may touch, not even diagonally.
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Name a mountain range. Move the third letter to the start to name some Europeans.Who are they?Brain Tickler
SATURDAY’S ANSWER Alerted, altered, redealt, relatedANSWERS TO
PREVIOUS PUZZLESPUZZLE BY WILL SHORTZ
Crossword Edited by Will Shortz
ACROSS
1 Part of a
constellation
5 Facing the
pitcher
10 Top Olympic
medal
14 Parasitic insects
that suck
15 Digestive aid
brand
16 Song for a diva
17 Prefix with knock
or lock
18 Position sought
every six years
20 Close guy friend
22 In his Webby
Lifetime
Achievement
Award
acceptance
speech (which
is limited to five
words), he said
“Please don’t
recount this vote”
23 What unagi is, at
a sushi bar
24 2014 film in
which David
Oyelowo played
Martin Luther
King Jr.
26 Home theater
feature, maybe
31 “To thine ___ self
be true”32 Chinese-born
architect who
won a 43-Across
33 Well-behaved
35 Odometer button
37 Vietnamese New
Yea r
38 Row of bushes
39 What to leave a
phone message
after
40 Got out of bed
42 Home heating
option
43 Annual award for
architects
47 Coat of paint
48 Chaney of silent
films
49 Far ___ (a long
distance away)
52 Safest course of
action
56 Pop-up store
opportunity for
bargain hunters
59 Vogue competitor
60 Savings plans for
old age, in brief
61 :
62 Cape Canaveral
org.
63 Erotic
64 Newspaper
pieces collected
in the book “The
Last Word”65 “How do you like
___ apples?”DOWN
1 Close with a bang
2 Funny Fey
3 Intermission
preceder
4 Director Rob
5 Son of David
in the Old
Testament
6 One starting
college, typically
7 Prohibit
8 Santa ___ winds
9 Wrecks beyond
repair
10 Dashboard dial
that goes from
“E” to “F”
11 Cookie since
1912
12 Polygraph flunker13 See socially
19 Red Muppet on
“Sesame Street”
21 Kind of badge for
a scout
24 One expressing
contempt
25 Newspaper
worker
26 Clean with a
broom
27 Al ___, four-time
Indianapolis 500
winner
28 Slow on the ___
29 Product for
one pulling an
all-nighter
30 Motherless calf
31 Heavenly sphere
34 Dover’s state:
Abbr.
36 Cause of seizures
38 Long lunches?41 Lymphocyte-
producing organs
44 Like most
centers in
basketball
45 Louisiana
music typically
featuring an
accordion
46 Purpose
49 Thrift shop
caveat
50 Taxi charge51 Big-screen film
format
52 Rorschach
image
53 Lackluster
54 “If all ___ fails ...”55 Sports squad
57 Have a bawl
58 Ring master?ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLEPUZZLE BY PETER GORDON6/29/20Online subscriptions: Today’s puzzle and more than 9,000 past puzzles,
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