In Aurora (Minotaur, June), veteran screenwriter Koepp imagines the impact of a massive, sustained global energy outage.

Where did you get the idea for this book?

I just always sort of collected string on the idea of how and why the world’s power grids might go down—it’s a story I’ve always been interested in. But I didn’t want to do something that was an apocalyptic big thing where you show capitals falling. I wanted to see what happened to two tiny communities, one in which, the character, Aubrey, was completely unprepared, and one in which the character, Thom, was completely overprepared, and how their fates might cross.

Which one of them did you come up with first?

I probably thought of Aubrey first, because I more identified with someone who was not prepared for this. I usually live in New York, but I’m not prepared for blackouts and hurricanes. I’m living in California for a year, but I’m not prepared for fires or earthquakes. I talk about it, but I am unprepared. So, I probably identified with her more.

To what extent was it a conscious choice to have the disaster one that was unavoidable?

It was a very conscious choice. I think that in any of these situations, we look for whose fault it is, which is why I think that the lab leak theory in Wuhan became popular. We look for answers, that “this” happened because it was someone’s fault. And that makes sense of the universe—if only that person hadn’t screwed up, we’d all be fine. But in fact, we don’t live in a universe that makes sense. And the outages here aren’t anyone’s fault. Solar storms do occur, every single year, and they do hit Earth straight on about every 150 or 200 years. And so I wanted to focus, not on the mystery of whether it’s anyone’s fault, but on how do we deal with it.

Were there habits from your decades of screenwriting that you had to unlearn?

I had to learn patience. Screenplays are so much about concision—reducing to just three lines what you might have wanted to see in 20. And you’re always in a hurry, you want to get things moving. And so I had to learn the ways at which you suggest to a reader that this plot is all going somewhere, and this all ties together, without being too overt about it. I’m not above ending a chapter with something that suggests big stuff ahead. But you have to be able to tell the story in a patient manner, while still doing justice to the characters.