India, June 20 -- 1What was the driving imagery behind Eradication? The seeds for this novel were planted 20 years ago, when I was in the Galapagos Islands on a reporting assignment. I was with the Ecuadorian Navy, observing their efforts to combat illegal shark poaching. While I was there, I happened to hear about efforts to eradicate feral goats, to preserve habitat for endangered tortoises. I was immediately struck by the moral friction of this noble ecological purpose chafing against what is essentially mass slaughter. The novelist in me started wondering what this friction would be like for an individual. If there was a filmic image, that's when it appeared: that of the person holding the rifle. I wondered what it would feel like to him. Larger questions trailed behind: When is killing righteous? Who gets to decide? As the painter and musician Terry Allen once said, "The shortest distance between two questions is art." 2I read a few research papers on the goat-eradication efforts in the Galapagos for ecological restoration and was struck by the necropolitical framework. When talking about ecology, we must step back and realise what we call "nature" is a human construct. What we define as "wilderness" is likewise a human construct; we define it by our distance from it. In the case of the fictional Foundation in the book, it believes that goats are invasive. It's the word they use. By eradicating them, the island of Santa Flora can be restored to its "natural state". That's an arguably valid but fraught argument, because the Foundation is hewing to the idea that there is a natural, Edenic state. Our ecologi-cal decisions, then, are often shaped less by ecosystems themselves than by the stories we tell about them. 3Eradication is peppered with music- related metaphors. You also have a music career. You've opened for the Rolling Stones and toured with Jon Batiste's band. What is your association with music vis-a-vis writing? Writing, at its core, is a sonic exercise. The words a novelist types onto a page are like the notes a composer writes on a score. Words are representations of sounds, which is what storytelling is at that core: an oral exercise. I started playing music as a teenager, and for most of my life, I kept music and writing in separate mental compartments, as if they operated under different laws. I don't think that anymore. They feel like variations of the same impulse. Whether you're arranging notes or sentences, you're working with sound as a way of shaping meaning. The medium changes but the instinct doesn't. Intellectually, aesthetically, emotionally, or physically, you're trying to move people....