James Rollins on Life, "The Seventh Plague," and Donald Trump

In the world of scientific/historical fiction (think Michael Crichton), few are as prolific as James Rollins. Beloved by fans for his heady mix of adventure and end-of-the-world science research, Rollins has pumped out 33 books over the last decade and a half. His most successful are those in the Sigma Force lexicon, spanning a dozen novels following a team of covert USA operatives secretly working within DARPA.

The latest in the series is "The Seventh Plague," featuring a mystery right out of the Bible that unleashes a variant of the legendary ten plagues of Moses. Heroes Painter Crowe and Grayson Pierce, along with their regular host of memorable compatriots, are sent to stop the disease before it cripples humanity.

During the first minute of my interview with Rollins, I ask the predictable question: where in the world does he come up with this stuff?

I can almost hear him grimace on the phone; it's a common question for fiction writers.

"I've always got my antenna up and I'm always looking for the next big idea," he explains. "That piece of history that raises a question mark, that maybe I can solve on the pages of a novel. Or I'm looking for that bit of science, that sort of 'gee whiz, where is this heading next' mystery that I can build into a novel."

It's a pursuit that has seen his characters tackle the mysteries of Atlantis, Ghengis Khan, Marco Polo, even the Greek Oracle at Delphi in a seemingly never-ending quest to save the world; usually, from its most evolved occupants.

"On many occasions when I do the research I'll interview someone and I can hear them express this concern or fear," he recounts. "I try to capture what I'm hearing on paper."

Lately, those concerns have included the advent of consumer-level bioengineering.

"I was speaking to the head of the FBI Director for Biological Safety," he explains. "They oversee biolabs - especially the level 3 and 4 labs that contain the most deadly organisms. And I was hearing from him about the mistakes that were occurring in the labs before it hit the news. Likewise he was telling me that the problem now is that it's becoming cheaper and cheaper to bioengineer life. Right now there are people who have in their own garages the ability to genetically alter organisms. They're producing and patenting these new biological life-forms. So you can only imagine the concern we have about what might happen, or what might be unleashed."

If it sounds as if that frightening possibility might evolve into the next James Rollins novel, stay tuned.

Bioterror, ecological disasters, and governmental abuses are core to the genre in 2017. Nonetheless, a small tidbit from Rollins' research on Nikola Tesla (who appears in "The Seventh Plague") ended up surprising even Rollins. Tesla, whose inventions - starting with alternating current electricity - to this day still surprise scientists with their foresight, left trunks of information behind in the Hotel New Yorker after his death in 1943. They were seized by the Office of Alien Property, who assigned an electrical engineer with the National Defense Research Committee of the Office of Scientific Research and Development to analyze them.

His name was Dr. John G. Trump. And his nephew is now running the country.

"That was weird," Rollins laughs. "That was very weird."

As it takes six months for his books to evolve from writing to release, when Rollins discovered this connection Trump wasn't even close to winning the White House.

"But I incorporated it, and then he won the Republican nomination and I thought, 'Well that's worrisome.' And then he became president. Life is sometimes strange."

Indeed, in the era of Trump and his deeming predilection for unbinding government's reliance on science - particularly with regard to global warming, a recurrent theme in the Sigma Force novels - Rollins feels stories such as his have a significant role to play.

"If there's anything that's an advantage of arts is that we can shine a light on some of these issues," he muses. He also includes social rights, particularly LGBT rights, in that scope. Many of his novels - including "The Seventh Plague" - have gay characters.

"My goal is first to entertain, and keep you turning pages into the night," he explains. "But hopefully when you turn the last page I'll have left you something to think about. Whether it's something about history, something about science, or something about the state of the world."

He even opines about a late-breaking news cycle.

"The fact that we're talking about the world of alternate facts," he laments, then resets. "You know I play in that world. That is my world. My job is to blur the line between fact and fiction. Which is fun for a novel, but it's not a viable way of running a government."

Perhaps that's why fiction as escapism is a viable tool in our current climate of untamed-science-meets-nihilistic-policies fear.

Plus, he points out, it's always more fun when someone else is dodging the bullets.

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James Rollins appears tonight, Friday January 27, at the Harvard Coop in Cambridge to present "The Seventh Plague." You can meet the author starting at 7:00 pm.

On the web:

James Rollins online
Sigma Force on Facebook