We have lost our sense of the mundane. That was one of the great things about Philip K. Dick. He didn’t make science fiction about the Space Prince or the World Conqueror or the President of the Universe. He wrote about the janitors, the technicians, the laborers. The ones who get stuff done. They were the ones dealing with the extraordinary. And no one seems to be carrying on the legacy.

Case in point, what was the overarching theme from The Incredibles? “There are only a few special people in the world. And you are not one of them.” Why would the fastest being on the planet need to compete in track and field, except to rub our noses in our own ordinariness? And why would his parents need to see him do that? At the beginning of the film, they didn’t want Dash to compete because they feared exposure, not because it would eliminate any sense of competition to the proceedings (i.e., he would mop the floor with all the kids who were actually trying). On the other hand, Syndrome was a modern-day Prometheus, hoping to bring exceptional qualities (fire) to us ordinary people. And he was the bad guy.

Moving on, I thought Star Trek the franchise needed a mundane makeover. Dispense with the Captain Worship. Especially after the top-down disaster that was Star Trek: Enterprise. Focus on the men and women who really make the ship run – the people cleaning the air ducts, mopping down the transporter rooms, polishing the communications consoles. Really, Captain Worship is just one step above Wesley Worship, and no one wants that.

Well, the new Star Trek film (which I thoroughly enjoyed, by the way) still carries our obsession with those at the top. I had my initial doubts about the movie, mainly because Alias was a show about worshipping Jennifer Garner, and I feared J.J. Abrams would carry that over – Kirk would wear a fluorescent-orange wig, cop an attitude to infiltrate the Klingon High Council, and the rest of the crew would have nothing to do but marvel at his mad skills. Star Trek didn’t go that far, but still, I feel we’ve lost our appreciation for the mundane, which is doubly troubling because one, most of us have to live in it and two, we are growing blind to the important stuff that happens in this space. Maybe that’s why everyone nowadays thinks they’re going to be famous.

Another big part of the Highway Virus series, and another aspect that seems prima facie unlikely, is the presence of the trogg dogs. They are roving packs of canine-like scavengers, which will attack and consume humans, alive or dead. They hunt alone and in packs, they are hideous with no qualities we would value (so no threat from trophy hunting), they can survive under a variety of conditions (so no threat from habitat loss), and they’ll eat anything.  In short, they have evolved to survive and thrive in this world, to the detriment of all other species.

For the purposes of the stories, they are a good device to get rid of all the bodies stricken by the Highway Virus. They are wild animals, running around, eating our dead.

Their existence seems unlikely as the emergence of a new species takes much longer than the timeframe presented in this series. I took inspiration from the Mad Max movies by framing the stories at some undetermined time in the future – but it is still the “near future” and not some distant era of the 3000s, when the Earth will be a junked wasteland (see WALL-E) or uninhabitable cinder.

That is probably not is enough time for a new species to evolve through means of mutation and natural selection, especially a large predator the size of a bear that exhibits similarities with wild dogs. The idea was that this new species would emerge (perhaps accelerated through interactions with the virus) with special adaptations to survive in this new environment, one of waste and disease. And as long as it has none of the qualities we envy or admire, we won’t hunt it to near extinction (think the tiger or the rhino versus the feral pig or the hyena).

So, the emergence of the trogg dogs is more Lamarckian than Darwinian – and granted, while the notion of the inheritance of acquired characteristics is largely considered discredited, it refuses to die.

But in the end, this is fiction, so I don’t want to get bogged down in the science. The first source of inspiration for the trogg dogs was the book Monster of God, but from there, I tried to make them more of supernatural creatures (God loves a pseudo-scientist) – hellhounds arisen on earth to exact divine vengeance for our transgressions. We seem intent on destroy the earth (or at least remaking it in our image), so it is bound to fight back.