The central story in NK3 is the story of a man who whose designated name is Hopper who has come from some mysterious location–probably in Palm Springs– sneaking into the city to find his wife. He doesn't remember her. He doesn't know what she looks like. And doesn't know her name. He hasn't seen a picture of her. He just knows that she's in the city somewhere. 



The loss of memory protects people from the present as much as it protects them from the past. As I was working on the book, I was thinking a lot about climate denial as a form of willed amnesia. That is you deny the climate science to detach people from the truth so they can protect themselves, you have a comfort that the world is a safe place. 



There's a fortress wall. It goes from West Hollywood, to Westwood, to Century City, and around the Hollywood Hills to Ventura Boulevard. Inside that fortress is a society that's bases on Burning Man if it's modeled after anything. And outside it is on the way to being burned down so that there's no place for stragglers and the non-useful survivors of NK3– the memory destroyer. There's no place for them to hide. 

I wanted to do something with a Los Angeles novel that East Coast writers, English writers, Russian writers get to do which is to name districts and name streets without explaining them. When I was a kid reading Russian literature I knew where the Nevsky Prospect was. I knew the bridges– I knew the towns of Russia. You don't have to live in New York to know what the Upper West Side is, or to know what Westchester is, or commuter trains. And I really wanted to be able to say Riverside, and Gardena, and Burbank and Tujunga. And All the parts of Los Angeles without explaining them. So that if someone in LA would have the reference point and anybody else would just have to glean it.

In the world of NK3, it takes place with the Hollywood sign up but three letters are missing so nobody even knows what it stands for. Nobody remembers it. They do watch movies sometimes. They can't comprehend the stories anymore– the stories don't make any sense because the old mythology, and the old stories, and the old human relationships no longer exist the way they used to– so what they do when they're watching the movies is concentrate on the traffic because it shows a world that has disappeared. And they don't even recognize themselves in those cars.

The power structure in an inversion of the power structure that exists now. When I first got the idea for a weaponized virus that destroyed memory, I started to think of the implications of that, what it would mean, and then who would be useful, and what would matter in the new society. Those people who could maintain the systems, who knew how to manage electricity, and plumbing, and pumps, they became the first people to be given whatever meager rehabilitation there was available to protect them and save them from the ravages of NK3. People who do abstract things like writers and lawyers become useless in the new society.

When I gave the book out for jacket quotes, I gave it to my friend Chris Kraus who said ‘It's tempting to call Nk3 the first book of the Trump era.’ And I worked on it for 6 years and I think I anticipated the chaos that we're in right now because that was in the air. That was in the atmosphere. To be prophetic and prescient is just to be accurate about the present. If you're accurate about the present, you look like you're predicting the future.