Science Fiction all the way!

Yes. The target audience is Adult & Young Adult science fiction readers. However, savvy teens might also enjoy it. The youngest reader that I’m aware of (as of this writing) was 13 years old while the oldest was 79.

The closest comparison would be The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton. Both books are about an extraterrestrial pathogen sparking a deadly pandemic on earth, but the narrative arcs are vastly different.

The main theme is “dangers of the unknown” as it applies to manned space exploration. In the novel, there’s a BSL-4 laboratory on the moon but the NASA Astrobiology Institute makes a unilateral decision to bring alien bacteria back to earth for study and the consequences are disastrous. From a biosafety perspective, we as a species are inadequately prepared for our first extraterrestrial encounter. We’re hearing about the Artemis program in the news. It has a shorter-term goal of re-establishing a human presence on the Moon and a longer-term goal of facilitating human missions to Mars. If we’re serious about colonizing other worlds and studying any extraterrestrial life forms we may encounter, we need the capability to conduct thorough lab studies in space without introducing potentially deadly microbes into Earth’s fragile ecosphere.

From a science-fiction perspective, I hope they take away the experience of a fantastic read and a great adventure. From a non-fiction perspective, I hope it causes us to question our state of biosafety readiness for close encounters of the extraterrestrial kind.

Actually, there were multiple “working titles” throughout the writing & editing processes. A couple of earlier titles were “The Doxan Pandemic” and “inDOXAcated” (a mashing of the English word “intoxicated” and the ancient Greek word ‘doxa”).

Yes, the inspiration came while I was working on my first book, The Doxan. The original hospital scene in that book was much longer and I needed to shorten the overall length of the first book. So I pulled out part of the hospital scene and it became the seed for The Wormwood Variant.

I like Johnny Churchill the most for a couple of reasons. First, because he’s a gifted, action-packed superhero. And secondly, because he tends to give me a lot more feedback about the storyline than the other fictional characters. But ours isn’t always a harmonious relationship. He’s very opinionated when it comes to the narrative arc. If he likes where the story is headed then all is well in the universe, but if he doesn’t like the direction it’s taking then he becomes quite vocal about it.