Doug:
What is the biggest danger facing humankind in the coming century?
Richard:
Advanced biological weapons. The 20th century was the century of nuclear physics. The next century is going to be the century of biology, for good and evil. As we begin to understand how genes really operate, we will gain the ability to actually decide on our own evolution. We will have the power to change our species, if we choose to do that. And we will have the power to use life as a weapon in order to destroy life. It's happening already. Right now, there may be as many as 25 countries working on bioweapons. We can assume that genetic engineering is part of this process. I know there are people at the CIA who are extremely frightened about this prospect. These weapons--using smallpox, for example--are already potentially as powerful as the hydrogen bomb, in their ability to rake the human population and cause sudden global mortality. Despite these threats, civilization will carry on, and the world in the 21st century will be an interesting, even wonderful, place to live.
Doug: If smallpox broke out worldwide, what would you and your family do?
Richard: A single case of smallpox anywhere on earth would be a global medical emergency. It's wildly contagious. There is no longer any smallpox vaccine available. And the vaccine wears off, so most people have lost their immunity. I would telephone certain scientists I know who have the skills to make the smallpox vaccine in a flask quietly in their own labs. Then I would call my friends. You'd get a little something by Federal Express, Doug.
Doug: If Federal Express is still running.
Richard: It will be. In the 19th century, every family lost members, particularly children, to infectious disease. It was simply a fact of life. People carried on.
Doug: Who keeps smallpox for use as a biological weapon?
Richard: The U.S. government has a classified hot list. It includes Iraq, Russia, China, and North Korea, and probably others--possibly Serbia, Libya, Syria, Pakistan, and India. It may include terror groups: the Aum Shinrikyo sect of Japan, the terror organization of Osama bin Ladin. No one really knows.
Doug: Do you ever look at your kids and wonder what dangers will face them in the next century?
Richard: Don't you? They face the hazards of history. Wars and hatred will be with us forever. But I have incredible faith in kids today. They will do wonders.
Doug: What do you look forward to in the 21st century?
Richard: Knowledge, above all. There are beautiful, deep mysteries that may be solved in our lifetimes. For example, I hope we'll see a grand unified theory of physics that explains all the fundamental forces of nature. The origin of life: how did life arise? Is there life out there in the universe? Then there's the question of what the universe is actually made of--because right now, 95% of the universe is so-called "dark matter," and we have no clue what it is. There's another question, involving mathematics. It's the question of the pattern of prime numbers--how are prime numbers distributed through the set of all integers? Nobody understands the pattern of prime numbers. If people of the next century can begin to answer these questions, there will be a grandeur to their time.
Doug: You were an English major at Pomona. How did you get from there to deadly viruses and bioterrorism?
Richard: After Pomona I went to Princeton and got a Ph.D. in English. While at Princeton, I studied with the author John McPhee, who teaches a writing class in nonfiction, and I became entranced with nonfiction writing. I did a lot of magazine work and began writing for The New Yorker. I wrote two nonfiction books, First Light and American Steel. Then I stumbled across viruses. Federico Fellini once said that sometimes when you pull on a small tail you find it attached to an elephant. I heard a little story about the Ebola virus, and that led me to The Hot Zone. While I was working on The Hot Zone, it became apparent to me that biological weapons were the other side, an even darker side, of that story. That led me to write The Cobra Event.
The book started out as non-fiction, but I had many sources who did not want to be named, so I made it fiction. I confess that I was also inspired by your novels. But the chapters of Cobra Event that are titled "Invisible History" are essentially nonfiction. When Bill Clinton read The Cobra Event, it reportedly kept him up all night, really scared him. He gave it to his national security people for an intelligence evaluation. They came back and said the book is accurate.
Not long after The Cobra Event was published, one of my sources told me that he had just come back from a National Security Council meeting at the White House. There was a CIA official there who was almost pounding the table, saying, "Half of the The Cobra Event is supposed to be classified. What is this information doing in a novel and how did Richard Preston get it?
Doug: On another subject, I'd like to ask you about your Hollywood career. Let's start with Pomona alumna Lynda Obst ['72], who was important for you.
Richard: Lynda Obst is a great film producer. She made Sleepless in Seattle, Contact, The Fisher King. In 1993, she bought film rights to The Hot Zone for 20th Century Fox. The Hot Zone project was an incredible Hollywood disaster. Not Linda's fault.
Doug: What happened?
Richard: It began as a race between two big Hollywood studios. While Lynda was starting The Hot Zone at Fox, Arnold Kopelson, a powerful producer at Warner Bros., was racing Lynda to make a competing virus movie, a knockoff of The Hot Zone--that was the film Outbreak, starring Dustin Hoffman and Renee Russo.
Lynda, meanwhile hired Robert Redford and Jodie Foster to star in Hot Zone. She hired director Ridley Scott--he had directed Alien and Blade Runner. But Redford and Foster disagreed on the screenplay, and Scott got embroiled in a contract dispute with Fox.
Two weeks before filming was supposed to begin--summer of 1994--Jodie Foster walked. Arnold Kopelson and Warner Bros. were no doubt overjoyed to see Hot Zone in trouble. When Jodie quit, Lynda reportedly rushed to hire Meryl Streep. Warner Bros. got wind of it and quickly made Meryl an offer of $8 million to make The Bridges of Madison County--and it may have been at least partly to get Meryl away from Hot Zone.
At that point, the Hot Zone project crashed and burned. Fox had spent $11 million building the sets. To my knowledge, those Hot Zone sets are still sitting in a pile at the 20th Century Fox lot in Los Angeles.
Lynda Obst has said it may have been the bitterest moment of her career. She may still make The Hot Zone--who knows? It's interesting, Doug, that Arnold Kopelson later offered you a nice option to film your novel, Riptide. I remember you called me, afraid I'd be upset.
Doug: You said to me, "Go ahead--at least one of us will make some money out of Arnold Kopelson."
Richard: He makes hits. What more can you ask?
Doug: So what's going on with the movie of The Cobra Event?
Richard: I sold the rights to 20th Century Fox. The producer is Art Linson. There's a screenplay being written. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.
Doug: Let's talk about Pomona. Why did you
go there?
Richard: I was rejected by every other college I applied to. I had a terrible high school record, which included assaulting a teacher.
Doug: Where were you rejected from?
Richard: All the right places. My rejection from Stanford came back so fast it was almost warm.
Doug: So did mine. Yet you graduated from Pomona summa cum laude.
Richard: I was rejected from Pomona, too. But I really wanted to go there. So I started calling the Dean of Admissions--Jack Quinlan--once a week, collect. He kept accepting my calls. I said to him, "Does, like, Pomona ever change its mind?" Finally he told me I was on the wait list. I was admitted in February of 1973. They let you in, too.
Doug: We had a lot of fun at Pomona.
Richard: Like with our car.
Doug: Our 1965 Ford Falcon Futura. We called it the Tortuga. We covered it with racing stripes and bubbles made of glitter tape.
Richard: Doug, you ruined that car--you double-parked it one day in Los Angeles, and some angry man, whose car you had trapped, hammered our car all over with a ball-peen hammer. After that, the Tortuga was so ugly we were constantly being stopped by the highway patrol.
Doug: The hammering gave it a classic look.
Richard: And then later, you had somebody call me in my room in Clark V, pretending to be a police officer, saying that the car had been involved in a liquor store robbery and that a victim had been shot, and that I should immediately report to the Claremont police station to be interviewed as a suspect. I roared into the police station demanding a lawyer. The Claremont cops thought I was a lunatic. Do you realize this could have gotten me arrested?
Doug: I was hoping it would. Who were the teachers who most influenced you at Pomona?
Richard: That's a nice question to answer. Martha Andresen, in the English Department. She is intensely committed to her students. Ed Copeland, who's also an English professor. The late novelist and nonfiction author Darcy O'Brien, who taught English at Pomona before he moved to the University of Tulsa. He was a wonderful mentor. Darcy got both of us very excited about writing. In the creative writing class we took together, he read aloud drafts of his first novel, A Way of Life Like Any Other. It was a brilliant novel and it won the Hemingway Award. He showed us that we, too, could become writers.
Doug: I would like to add Thomas Pinney to that list of great English professors at Pomona.
Richard: Amen. You know who is absolutely cool? Richard Barnes, the poet and dramatist on the faculty. He is inspiring.
There was the astronomy professor, Robert Chambers, who died in 1995. He took our class on a field trip to the 200-inch Hale Telescope at Palomar Mountain. That telescope became the heart of my first book, First Light. Without that field trip, I might never have written the book.
Doug: I took that intro astronomy course. It was famous. He was an amazing teacher.
Richard: Harry Carroll, a professor of classics, was wonderful. I also took some great film courses from Professor Michael Riley, at CMC. He brought in film-makers to talk to his classes. It was shop talk, and it made Hollywood look somehow normal and fun.
Doug: Did you ever think you would become a best-selling author?
Richard: Not a chance. Did you? How did that happen?
Doug: We had a lot of practice telling stories at the dinner table.
Richard: We grew up in a family of raconteurs. We all tried to top each other. I remember Dad telling stories about his wild and wacky clients. There were good stories floating around our family.
The Pomona English Department also had a lot to do with us becoming authors. The faculty taught us to value literature as something alive and real, meaningful for us and for the world we live in. I feel we were lucky to escape the kind of pretension one can sometimes see in English departments.
It was particularly true in our day, when post-modernism was coming into fashion and was beginning to really distort the teaching of English at some Ivy League universities. I suspect that if we had been drenched with the post-modernism of [Jacques] Derrida and [Jacques] Lacan [French literary philosophers who were influential in the 1970s and '80s], it would have left us unable to function in the real literary world.
Darcy O'Brien and other great professors like Tom Pinney and Martha Andresen were much too smart to get caught up in mind games and ideology. They taught literature as it lives and breathes.
Doug: It wasn't just the English Department. We both took a lot of science courses at Pomona, and got turned on to science, and then pursued science writing. What else do you remember from Pomona?
Richard: The terrible things we did, Doug. But it was the poet Vergil who said that terrible things can be pleasant to remember.
Doug: Such as what?
Richard: Such as when we were both living in Mudd-Blaisdell and someone kept stealing our wine from the hall refrigerator? We wanted to do something about it. You told me about ...
Doug: Ipecac syrup. It makes you vomit.
Richard: Uncontrollably, it's an emetic. So we bought a bottle of ipecac at the drugstore. We poured it into a bottle of Boone's Farm Apple Wine. We screwed the cap back on, and left it in the refrigerator. Pretty soon the Boone's Farm disappeared. The guy took it back into his room and drank it. The ipecac took effect abruptly. He couldn't get out of his room in time.
Doug: All in all, what kind of education did you get at Pomona?
Richard: I got an intense and deep liberal arts education spanning the humanities and the sciences. At Pomona, you develop close relationships with your professors. There's an intellectual scrappiness
in Pomona graduates. They're unpretentious. They're willing to take risks. They go out into the world knowing how to glow with their own light. They will throw their light into the coming century, I am sure of that. They will be a part of the grandeur of it all.
Douglas Preston '78 is the author of such works of non-fiction as Cities of Gold and Talking to the Ground and such best-selling novels as Relic, Riptide (both with Lincoln Child) and Jennie. For a review of his new book, Thunderhead, see page 32.
--Illustration by Dugald Stermer
