After a positive review, Publisher's Weekly interviewed Rachael about Resistant.
Excerpted below. Read the full interview here.
How did your science background help you tell this story?
My college thesis was about resistant bacteria. I got to see it in real life—both literally, in the bodies of people who passed away, and throughout many medical charts. We use so many antibiotics for so many things we ought not to, in human health care, but also in agriculture. We have just no concept of how far gone we are in terms of not having antibiotics when we need them. There is a really good chance that we’re going to be in a situation of having Civil War medicine—your last resort will be an amputation. I think that we don’t really give it enough attention because it’s kind of an abstract problem and scientifically complex to explain. So it was really important to me to try to try to fold a good translation into the story. There are ways to comprehend it, and we need to comprehend it. I think if a good fiction story leaves you with thoughts about something like that, then I won.
A version of this article appeared in the 09/10/2018 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: A Scientifically Accurate Apocalypse
