Jerry asked Brian Herbert:

Brian what is your writing process like? From inception to fruition. Thanks.

Brian Herbert It varies from book to book, but I like to begin with a high-concept, usually a large social idea—something I can use as a format for an important message to my readers. Then I form a story around that concept. A couple of years ago, my wife, Jan, suggested a story about the ocean (and its creatures) declaring war on human civilization because of all of the pollution we have caused. The ocean and its marine animals hurl floating plastics and other garbage up on the beaches, and force humans to clean it up. Shipping operations are blocked by huge, powerful creatures of the sea, and humans are not allowed to go back in the water, except under the strict control of an environmental activist group called the Sea Warriors. This novel, OCEAN, was recently published.
Another high-concept novel will be published in July 2014 – THE LITTLE GREEN BOOK OF CHAIRMAN RAHMA. This postulates that a Berkeley type group of left-wing “radicals” takes over North and South America, and creates a green utopia in which people are forced to live on densely-populated reservations, and the environment is restored. But it is not a nice place for humans to live…
Other novels that have high concepts are my 3-book TIMEWEB series (about a galactic-scale environmental disaster), THE STOLEN GOSPELS (about sacred religious texts favoring women being deleted from the Bible), and THE RACE FOR GOD – about religions competing to get to God first, where he resides far out in the universe – and the religious zealots kill each other to get there first.

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