John Nelson, The Author
About The Book
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Get the Book? Wildchildpublishing.com (E-book) | Amazon.com (E-book) | Barnes & Noble (E-book)
The U.S. is ground-zero for a mysterious global pandemic. The disease is highly infectious and kills its victims within two weeks of exposure. It's neither bacteria nor a virus and all traditional treatment regiments have failed.
Serena Salus, a radical scientist, discovers the organism is an extraterrestrial dust mite brought to earth by a shuttle astronaut. The government contends it's a genetically-engineered organism created on earth by enemies of freedom.
Dr. Salus uncovers a vile plan for distributing her experimental antitoxin and finds herself in a deadly confrontation with powerful forces that'll stop at nothing to control the distribution of her vaccine.
Genre: Action-Adventure/Thriller
A Dystopian Journey
by: John Nelson
When we pick up a work of fiction and start turning pages, we hope to begin a journey. A good novel will hooks us right away and transport us there quickly. We choose a genre like a holiday destination. My holiday destination is often the dystopian genre. I read to escape, be entertained, and mentally stimulated. I want a book to make me pause, think and reflect.
In my novel Against Nature the catalyst for the dystopia is a global pandemic; a disease without a cure. Unlike some dystopia where you begin the story in the post-apocalyptic landscape and you may or may not learn how the world got in such a state, I take the reader from the present and we journey together into the darkness.
To spice things up a bit I made the disease-causing organism an extraterrestrial microbe introduced to earth in the wound of an astronaut. I wanted to create a disease that went against our normal understanding of biology. The highly infectious organism doesnt behave like bacteria or a virus; it goes against our understanding of nature.
I wanted to write a fast-paced modern dystopia in the spirit of Orwell, Huxley and Crichton. I didnt want to write a predictable Hollywood-style tale of good versus evil and good triumphs. I wanted to write something more complicated and complex than that. I wanted to write something fresh and new that took the reader on a wild ride and left them breathless.
I found plenty of inspiration for a dystopia in the news headlines over the past decade. A few years ago the headlines were filled with tales of secret prisons, torture, extraordinary rendition, suspending habeas corpus, domestic spying, and wars based on falsified intelligence. Fact can make great fiction and the misdeeds of the recent past helped me build a vision of pandemic America. I think Against Nature may be the first modern dystopia written about the post-9/11 landscape.
I think a key ingredient that makes the dystopian genre so rich and relevant is that it allows the reader to see a reflection of their own society in the pages of the fantasy society. Thats what I hoped to achieve with Against Nature. Ill leave it up to my readers to decide if I succeeded.
John G. Nelson is a retired Air Force Master Sergeant and former Special Operations MedicAir Commando. He now lives a quieter life as a healthcare executive and fiction writer.
His novel Against Nature is available as an ebook from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Apple iBooks and from the publisher:
Wildchildpublishing.com (E-book) | Amazon.com (E-book) | Barnes & Noble (E-book)
