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Once The Descent was done, it was back to the drawing board. I always have about eight ideas for things to write, which doesn't mean they're always good ideas. For
instance, I've long wanted to write a human rights novel about Africa, but various agents and editors have warned me that in today's sales-driven publishing industry it would
probably be the last book I ever got published. So I dropped that one and went after another idea.
In researching the historical Satan, I’d developed a real hunger for the historical Jesus. I toyed with a historical novel set in the first century, but Kazantzakis had already done that one with the Last Temptation of Christ. Then I thought of time traveling to meet Jesus in Palestine, but Moorcock already did that with The Blood Red Came. George Steiner once wrote an incredible tale called The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H., about a team sent to find an ancient Adolph Hitler hiding in the jungles of South America, I wanted something like that, a manhunt for Jesus.
But how to find him, and where, loomed as real challenges. How to bring Jesus into the 21st century? Time travel was out, a film agent told me. And it did feel a little tired. That left cloning. But what to clone? The Shroud of Turin was a natural, but I’d already dismissed the Shroud in The Descent as a portrait not of Jesus, but of the Trickster, Satan. Moving on, I went for blood. Blood from a nail. A nail kept in a Roman vial. A Roman vial harboring plague. A plague that brings out the best and worst in mankind.
That led to Year Zero as a medical mystery based at Los Alamos. As my research broadened, I began to see how the old analogy of "religion as a plague"
has its counter-weight in "plague as a religion." There are many ways in which religion may behave like a disease, "infecting" host cultures, sometimes prompting "immune"
responses, and forcing the host to mutate, or evolve, in order to survive. Nothing new there, really.
But in reading chronicles of great diseases in history, especially in the scientific age, I was struck by how epidemics can trigger a religious reaction, provoking intense faith, superstition, spiritual fervor, and public health campaigns that resemble holy crusades. The laboratory, always a mysterious ,i>sanctum sanctorum to the general public, has given us miracles worthy of a Lourdes. Researchers have sometimes achieved the status of
prophets, martyrs, and saints, working in modern-day monasteries, wandering the planet like pilgrims on a quest, the scientists themselves occasionally admit to finding God
in the microscopic details.
Suddenly, it seemed like a door swung wide open for the historical Jesus to walk through.
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