Interview:UNTHINKABLE Issue #2

Are the vaccinations in this issue inspired by the recent Swine

Flu outbreak?

No...I had the story well plotted out before the Swine Flu, although it certainly adds resonance. I got my inspiration in part from the original Anthrax scare, and in part from an old episode of the X-Files.

That and...there's something inherently scary about vaccinations. For a deadly disease, by making the choice to administer a vaccine - which contains the virus itself - you are automatically condemning a small percentage of people to die to save the rest of the population. I actually wish I had shown some of that, but there wasn't enough room.

But without giving too much away, there may be more to the mandatory vaccinations in Unthinkable than meets the eye.

The first issue had a lot of twists but this one has even more; do you find it hard coming up with ways to make the plot twist?

I think to some degree all thrillers follow a certain pattern. The audience expects twists at certain key moments and as a writer you have to deliver them. So in that sense, it's not terribly hard.

  On the other...the twist at the end of issue 2

  (SPOILER) - when our heroes get captured...that

  was a case of the characters putting

  themselves in a situation that surprised me. I

  always planned on Ripley getting captured, but

  never this early in the series.

  The characters throwing me that curveball made

  it much harder to come up with twists that could

  top that in the later issues, but hopefully those

  will come be even more shocking. I just handed

  in issue 4 or to Managing Editor Matt Gagnon

  and he couldn't believe the ending...and he

  hasn't even seen issue 5 yet.

Do you know if there is anything like the oil-eating bacteria featured in this issue in real life?

Yes. There are oil-eating microbes that are used to clean up oil spills in the ocean. Where I took them into speculative fiction was the idea that there could be a strain that could survive without oxygen deep in an oil deposit. I don't know if that's scientifically possible. Of course, that's what they said about the atomic bomb.

How did you come up with the name “WolfPack”?

Well, it's probably no surprise that The WolfPack PMC (Private Military Contractor) is inspired by firms like Blackwater. Blackwater has their headquarters in North Carolina, where I went to Duje University. Being a huge Duke basketball fan, I thought I'd name them after our arch rivals, the Tar Heels of UNC. But The Wolfpack of North Carolina State sounded much more ominous than "Tar Heel Security."

What's interesting is that when I was writing the ARG (Alternate Reality Game), I had to flesh out the backstory of The WolfPack as well as the Think Tank members. I decided Isomer was a Holocaust survivor as well as a participant in the Manhattan Project. That meant he had to be at the first concentration camp liberated by the Americans.

The name of the American division that liberated the first camp? The U.S. Army's Timberwolf Division. It was one of those happy accidents, so I decided Ripley's father was a member of that division. In the story, Ripley's brother, the founder of the Wolfpack, named the company after that division as a way to honor his father's service in World War II.