Thomas P Hopp

Talk about an exotic setting for a mystery! The desert cliff shown here was once a waterfall three hundred times the size of Niagara that roared with the entire volume of the mile-wide Columbia River. This rampart is just one of two great circular cataracts that existed in Eastern Washington during the Ice Age. Part of the second can be seen to the right.

People who lived here must have been in awe of its thunderous roar. Native Americans of a long-forgotten tribe had only recently crossed from Siberia into North America. And where there are people, can murder lurk far behind?

My latest novel, Megaflood, is set against this 14,000-year-old backdrop. And as if that weren’t dramatic enough, the Ice Age animals that lived alongside the people were equally stupendous. Giant pachyderms came in three sizes: huge (the Wooly Mammoth), colossal (the Mastodon), and titanic (the Columbian Mammoth), the last of which made an elephant look like a pup. And that’s not to mention the Giant Ground Sloth and the Short-Faced Bear, which were elephant-sized as well. Let’s see, did I leave out anybody? Oh. Yeah. How about ravenous Cave Lions and Sabertooth Cats? Me-YOW!

It was my task as author to bring all this astonishing science and history into focus while telling the tale of two young people, outcasts in this foreboding landscape due to their forbidden love. Fleeing a wrathful chieftain, they plunged straight into even greater danger.

This is one of my most ambitious books to date, weaving an intricate path from modern archeologists exhuming a body from a cranberry bog in Chinook, Washington, to an ancient saga where heroic characters move through a world of sweeping beauty and face perilous threats, all in true-to-life detail. Megaflood is available for pre-order and will be released on May 1, 2022. So, if a mystery/romance/action/adventure story suits your reading preferences, why not click over to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books or other outlets and reserve your copy today? At $3.99, it’s $1 off the list price. You won’t be charged until the book ships, and you’ll be among the first to get it. Furthermore, by pre-ordering, you’ll help me make the day-of-release book sales more impressive to Amazon’s computers, which in turn will cause them to show the book to more potential customers. Thanks for your help, and I hope you enjoy the story!

Just as you get nice and immunized with COVID-19 vaccine, along comes a new terror—the viral variant! Deadlier strains of COVID are cropping up with alarming frequency. Such mutational shifts allow the new viruses to circumvent the immunity you acquired with your hard-won vaccination. So, are we doomed?

If it’s any consolation, this “variant” phenomenon is nothing new. Virologists have studied it for decades. Variants were first described among the influenza viruses of the great pandemic of 1918, in which they played a role in drawing out the pestilence for several years. And they’ve cropped up in every epidemic since. So even the frightfully named “Eek!” variant of COVID is not an entirely new concept.

But as we watch with dismay, this and other variants are arising around the globe with increasing frequency. So, it’s a cold comfort to know that they’re nothing new under the sun. Somehow, even the knowledge that humanity survived not just each new pandemic, but all the variant strains that piled onto previous plagues, is not entirely satisfying. Not when the virus threatens you and yours on a daily basis. Histories and statistics of mankind’s recovery from previous epidemics can’t help you shake the fear that, well, you might not be counted among the living when all is said and done.

So what’s this got to do with my fiction? Well, quite a bit, really. I anticipated this phenomenon in both of my epidemic novels, The Smallpox Incident and The Neah Virus. In each story, I laid out realistic scenarios based on my career-long studies of viruses and vaccines. My intent both times was to dramatize the social upheavals and desperate responses of medical and government agencies trying to avert catastrophe. Unsurprisingly to me, many events I portrayed have come true in the present emergency.

I also addressed the dire question, “Did this virus arise out of nature, or is it an escaped laboratory monster?” Without giving away too much let me just say, in one book the answer is “yes” and in the other the answer is even more unnerving. But one nice thing about fiction is that such questions can be examined carefully, and then answered clearly. No lingering doubts remain in the last pages of The Smallpox Incident or The Neah Virus. Don’t you wish life could imitate art in present circumstances?

Might I suggest you grab a copy on one or both of these now classic books, so you can read and reflect on the notion that nothing happening today is so terribly unheard of by scientists like me, who study viruses and vaccines? An added bonus is that my stories have relatively happy endings given the dire circumstances—and that’s the sort of outcome we all hope for in these trying times.

I’ve a mind to drive downtown on Thursday October 15 at 10:15 AM and roll down my car window. I’d like to hear the sound of the tsunami chimes ringing out. Wouldn’t you?

Seattle, and the whole nation for that matter, is preparing for the “Great Shakeout” earthquake drill scheduled then. I’m registered to participate as an individual who’s ready to get “all shook up,” along with many Seattleites in all walks of life and diverse places of school, work, or what-have-you.

This year, I’ve picked out tsunami preparedness as my special area of concern. This comes in response to things I learned while researching my novel, The Great Seattle Earthquake, published last year. You see, when I looked into the idea of a major quake striking right underfoot on the Seattle Fault, I learned that, in addition to the trauma and loss of life that would come from such a natural disaster, the threat of a devastating tsunami has been pretty well established by recent scientific studies. So, that leaves me wondering, are Seattle’s emergency planners covering this possibility adequately, or at all?

My research left me, well, just a little worried that the answer is “kind of.” As I wrote a year ago, I found the tsunami preparedness plan for our two waterfront stadiums definitely less-than-adequate. Here’s a link to that older article. This year, I’ve been wandering around the internet trying to glean any news about an improved stadium plan, but so far I’ve found nothing at all. That’s a step up, in my opinion, because the old plan told people to calmly exit the stadiums, which might mean tens of thousands of people walking straight into an oncoming tidal wave. So, the good news is, I didn’t find any of that old misinformation in the present plans. I guess maybe my blog did some good, somehow. On the other hand, what I found was–nothing at all.

But I did find an old Seattle Post Intelligencer article from 2005 describing the installation of the waterfront warning system shown above. According to that article, this is what you’ll hear in an emergency:

“The first thing will be a tone that’s an attention getter so people will listen,” Steve Marten, project manager said. “We’ve chosen the Westminster chimes.”

“That will be followed by an actual voice that will give a specific message so that we can direct people to do what they need to do to get out of harm’s way.”

Hopefully, 15 years later, this system is still in operation and ready to deliver the message, “Run like hell for high ground!” But I haven’t found much information about it other than the old article. Let’s hope it’s currently in place and in the hands of people who are ready to deliver the life-saving message.

As I portrayed vividly in my novel, folks in the stadium area will have only a few minutes to make up their minds whether they’ll flee to safety–or die.

So, yeah. I think I’ll drive downtown Thursday morning and find out how well the system is working.

Update October 16, 2020: I did like I said and went down to the waterfront and listened as 10:15 came and went without a sound. I stood there on Ivar’s Pier 54, staring at the Fireboat Leschi, which figures so prominently in The Great Seattle Earthquake, moored next door at Fire Station Number Five. I noticed that the alarm speakers shown above had been removed. But I can’t help but wonder. In the event of a quake on the Seattle Fault, those loudspeakers would be lifesavers. So, where did they go?

When I released my novel The Neah Virus back in 2013, there was little reason to suspect I was writing about issues we’d all be facing in 2020. But here we are, locked down–some of us–and hearing daily of a deadly nemesis that apparently arose among wild animals and made the leap from them to us. With horrendous consequences. And no end in sight (though as a vaccine researcher, I’m optimistic a cure is around the corner).

In my book, a virus emerges from nature at Neah Bay, a small Native American reservation town at the northwest tip of the Olympic Peninsula here in Washington State. People start dying. Contagion is rampant. The Centers for Disease Control calls for desperate measures, including quarantines that require the National Guard to intervene in the interest of public safety. Does any of this sound familiar?

Want more parallels? The virus in my story is a mutant, an altered form of the already deadly rabies virus, changed into an even more lethal and fast-spreading form. Sound familiar?

This is the sort of thinking that wakes me up at night and gets my fingers flying over the keyboard. Given my history of working on vaccines and immune-system hormones over an entire scientific career, I suppose it’s not too surprising. But with that background, when the imagination gets into overdrive, I come up with some pretty scary stuff. Scary to me, let alone an unsuspecting reader.

Consider this short excerpt:

“Once you’ve read the virus’s code, how many days will it take to make a vaccine?”

“The same rules apply as for other viruses,” McKean said gravely. “It takes months to produce each year’s influenza vaccine, and that’s a virus we have a lot of experience with. Given an unknown virus like this, it might take years to create a new vaccine.”

“Years! Isn’t there a shortcut?”

“We could try producing the virus’s surface protein in a bacterial culture—a subunit vaccine. That might be accomplished in weeks or months.”

“But that might be too late for us, if we’ve been exposed.”

His expression darkened. “Kay Erwin told me this morning the number of people with symptoms like Pete Whitehall’s has grown to eighty. That’s enough to convince me the virus is dangerous, even if the CDC still isn’t sure. How have you been feeling, Fin?”

End quote. Now, that’s what we’ve been hearing about the coronavirus–months to years before we have a vaccine. Yikes.

But here’s a nice thing about fiction: if the writer insists on a happy ending (or at least a non-lethal ending) then that’s what you get.

Here’s a link to more information about The Neah Virus if you’re interested.