Why I wrote The Doomsday Genie

by

Frank Ryan

In a way you could see The Doomsday Genie as the latest in a series of novels that featured two things: a fear as to where human ingenuity and hubris might be leading us, together with a theme based on the latest scientific knowledge.  Think about Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (the discovery that electricity was central to life), H G Wells The War of the Worlds (the discovery of supposed canals on Mars, and the implication of an older, dying civilisation), Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (human genetic engineering blended with the British class system) and Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain (Fred Hoyle's hypothesis of life being seeded from outer space). 

Perhaps you view the idea of a WMD style threat to humans and the biosphere from genetic engineering as an unlikely scenario?  If so, I’m afraid you’re being a little naïve.  On January 13 2001, New Scientist revealed how Ron Jackson, working for the wildlife division of Australia’s national research agency, set out to make a contraceptive vaccine to control plagues of mice. What he actually ended up with was a deadly mousepox virus that also resisted any attempts at protective vaccination.  Then, hard on the heels of 9/11, somebody sent anthrax spores through the post to journalists and politicians in America.  In July 2002 newspapers around the world carried the story of how Eckard Wimmer and his colleagues constructed a live polio virus in the lab from basic chemicals. This suggested, quite correctly, that any other virus – including epidemic smallpox, could similarly be constructed from chemicals in the lab.  On February 12 2005 New Scientist reported how Norman Packard, and many others, are racing to create the first artificial life form – which would introduce our world to its first really alien life form. I quote the article, “If life is all about the ability to evolve and adapt, then living technologies always have the potential to surprise us with unexpected new strategies that can take them beyond our control.” 

Then again, on 7 October 2006, under the heading “Fortress America”, New Scientist warned that, “Despite spending a fortune on biodefence, the US appears as vulnerable as ever to a concerted terrorist attack.”  Indeed, since 2005, a series of articles in leading science journals, such as New Scientist and Nature, have warned us about the potential threat of a biological weapon of mass destruction.  But nobody has taken much in the way of notice. 

Why then, you might yet argue, should I write my warning in the form of a thriller?  In 2006 the cosmologist, Janna Levin, stated: "Non-fiction often seems like the only genre in which science has a legitimate place.  But... scientific truth is sometimes best revealed in fiction."  As Janna reports, “There is something ruthless about science, beautifully ruthless.”  I couldn’t have better expressed my own feelings on the matter.  

In spite of all this, I have little doubt that most of my readers will enjoy the book purely for its thriller content.  If so, good luck to them.  I have to confess that I enjoyed writing about the bad guys - and there are some very bad guys indeed in this book.  As to the entity itself, I began with something much simpler – but it would have been too easy for the real bad guys to copy it – so I conceived a more interesting monster.  I enjoyed doing this so much that the monstrous entity became one of the most interesting characters in it.

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