Lois Lowry: We're at the part in the book where the
reader is feeling a terrible sense of suspense.
Nnedi Okorafor: All of the wahala, 
which is trouble, is coming up.
Neil Gaiman: We're in a what-if.
Max Brooks: There's no more normal. 
Not the way it used to be.
Okorafor: Several of my narratives have been dealing with the apocalypse
or are post-apocalyptic and a lot of that has
to do with the fact that those things
terrify me. The fear of the unknown
is just, for me as a writer, it is — it may
sound weird — it's intoxicating.
Us science fiction writers, we stay a step
ahead of everything, but it's moving so
fast that some us are
writing historic fiction as opposed to
science fiction.
Science fiction writers
aren't psychic. But one thing that I've
felt since all of this has happened is,
that this idea of, "Oh my gosh it's
finally happening."
It's not that I've been hoping for it to happen,
of course not, but I've always been
intensely aware of the fragility
of human civilization and 
how quickly it can fall apart.
Gaiman: Fiction always has the obligation to be
believable. And real life has no
obligation to be believable. So if I, or
if any of my friends, had written books
about pandemics, we would have assumed
automatically that you would have
leaders who would take scientific advice,
act upon it and do what was best for the world.
Normally, a writer of futuristic fiction
will look at something that is going on
in the world, isolate it and use it not
to predict, but to illuminate. I think
this period of time is going to be a
fertile time for storytellers for
decades and I hope centuries to come.
Lowry: The big question: what if? The big
question in just two words that
almost always leads into a story.
I think a book doesn't always answer questions.
The best books provide the questions for
the reader to consider. When I write
about people emerging from such a
catastrophe, I have to think about
what they would hold dear. My fear is
that we might look to the wrong people
for answers. I'm a person who does tend
to write happy endings, but we're not
there yet.
Brooks: I write a lot about characters who come up against a crisis that essentially
obliterate their old way of doing things.
It could be zombies, it could be Bigfoot,
it could be World War I. I can tell you
that specifically the reason in World
War Z has no central hero is because
that's not how big crises are solved.
Those big crises that affect us all have
to be solved by all of us. It may not be
some alpha male with a big gun or it may
not be some clairvoyant wizard or
someone with magical powers —
superheroes. A lot of times it just comes
down to each and every one of us getting
up every day and doing some very boring,
very mundane job that is a tiny little
piece of a bigger picture. 
We all have a role to play
