Although I wrote Vox as a cautionary tale, a warning call about gender politics and backlash and cultural shift, I also explored how much our humanity, our personhood, is tied to our ability to acquire and use language. In the book’s time period we never reach a point where the language faculty is wiped out, but that threat looms. What would our world look like if we (or some of us) lost the ability to communicate, to think, to express ourselves?

There’s also an exploration of cultural evolution, and we see this most in the conditioning of the main character’s children as they navigate the new rules, as they either embrace them or passively accept them.

I’d love readers to come away from Vox with two thoughts: (1) How easily can our world change while we’re not paying attention? And (2) How crucial to our being is the gift of language, that amazingly complex capacity we so often take for granted?

Which character in the book was most difficult to write?

I write quite a bit of flash fiction—in other words, extremely short stories, sometimes as little as a few hundred words. Flash lets me experiment with different voices and characters, so I’m comfortable moving from Lorenzo the Italian lover to Jackie the activist to Sharon, the down-to-earth, ever-so-smart farmer. Jean’s husband, Patrick, was tricky, though. I wanted him to be a fundamentally good guy, but also a passive man. Still, he’s smart. He’s the president’s science adviser. So his passivity had to be believable.

What compelled you to write Vox?

Vox began as a piece of flash fiction of about seven hundred words, for a contest with a doomsday theme. In it, I imagined a world in which a biological warfare agent spread rapidly, inducing a certain type of language impairment. The story, titled “Wernicke 27X,” illustrates what might happen if humans were suddenly incapable of speech and, consequently, of rational thought. It was terrifying.

When I found an anthology looking for fiction written by women and featuring female protagonists whose skills were central to the plots, I returned to “Wernicke 27X.” I asked myself how I could ramp up the terror, how I could expand on the idea of language loss—but only in half of the population. I took a long look at the current political climate, and found part of the answer there. So, Vox was born.

Is Wernicke’s aphasia a real communication disorder?