I grew up during the Cold War, when everything seemed very tenuous. For many years, right up until the fall of the Berlin Wall, I had vivid nightmares of nuclear apocalypse.

This ravishing world. This achingly bittersweet, ravishing world.

The world was a world of dreaming souls who could not die.

And I grew up on a steady diet of science fiction, especially apocalyptic and postapocalyptic fiction.

You learn to write by reading, and my experiences and tastes as a reader are pretty wide.

Before she became the Girl from Nowhere-the One Who Walked In, the First and Last and Only, who lived a thousand years-she was just a little girl in Iowa, named Amy. Amy Harper Bellafonte.

I'm still an English professor at Rice University here in Houston. They've been very generous in letting me on a very long leash to just work on 'The Passage' and its sequels.