10 Questions for Dan Brown

Author and secret-code enthusiast Dan Brown on futurists, gravity boots and his ritual for launching new books

Lee Towndrow for TIME

One of the themes of Inferno is overpopulation. Why that issue?
There is a statistic I heard a number of years ago: if you know somebody who is 85 years old, that person was born into a world that had a third as many people as the world does today. The population has tripled in the past 85 years. Futurists don't consider overpopulation one of the issues of the future. They consider it the issue of the future.

Is there a population solution that you favor in particular? Perhaps a one-child policy?
No, that is for readers to debate....

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