There is an old-fashioned aspect to how Shaun Wilson looks at the world.
The Maitland author doesn't own a mobile phone. If he wants to contact bookshops and have a yarn about his latest novel, he still marvels at the convenient wonders of the email.
But aside from those occasional encounters with modern technology, there appears to be very little about this prolific author that doesn't belong in the 19th century. Does that ever leave Wilson feeling even slightly left behind? Not on your life.
"I can ride a bicycle to the station and get the train to work," Wilson explains, on a phone that he borrowed from a friend.
"I can walk around the corner and get whatever it is that I need. And if I want to talk to someone then I always prefer to do it in person."
Yet this seemingly quaint, small-town philosophy only tells some of the Shaun Wilson story. For a man who counts his corner store as the keeper of all he needs, he's certainly travelled enough in the past.
When he tells me that the inspiration to begin his new novel, The Muller Vaccine, first came to him from a stormy mountain top in Tasmania, it sounded slightly fanciful. Yet there's something so matter-of-fact about the man that makes everything he says sound perfectly unadorned and ordinary.
"I was living down in Hobart at the time, working at a foundry down on the docks," he says.
"I woke up one morning and Mount Wellington was covered in snow. I'd never been to the snow before so I decided to take the day off work and drive up to the top of the mountain. But because the road to the peak was closed, I ended up climbing to the top with a friend of mine.
"It was while we were up there, with only a half pack of smokes between us, that I decided that I had to start writing."
But this story of unlikely inspirations, this small tale hidden behind a much longer one, somehow gets even better.
"Then I ran into Richard," recalls Wilson, as though the Oxford-educated, Booker-prize winning Richard Flanagan worked at the local bait and tackle. "Hobart's like that."
What Flanagan then told Wilson is the kind of advice that every writer, regardless of their talent, inevitably hears at some point or another.
"Get on with it," said Flanagan. And when one of our greatest living novelists spoke, Wilson was listening. Or perhaps it's better to say that he stopped listening and just started writing. And writing. And writing. A million and a half words. Eight volumes. Over 10 years. One of those volumes, The Muller Vaccine, a prophetic meta-fictional thriller set across continents and amongst duplicitous operatives, was published in August of this year.
It's a story that Wilson began back when vaccines were only what babies or international travellers had to worry about. Back when Muller was just a vaguely Germanic-sounding surname, not synonymous with a CIA director who almost brought down a president. Together the two words - vaccine and Muller - have almost become triggers. Together they fire our imaginations into the unsettled, existential frontiers of the present: pandemics, conspiracies, governmental recklessness and deceit.
Without even meaning to, in a way that befits him, Wilson may have just stumbled upon a plot for the age; a labyrinthine, techno-fable from a writer who eschews technology and prefers to tell it straight. His characters ski in Switzerland and appraise antiquities in Egypt. Their creator is a bloke bred in Abermain who uses a bicycle and a borrowed phone.
On looking back at the sheer volume of work that he has created, not to mention the narrative complexities within it, Wilson himself sounds a little bemused.
"I don't even think of myself as a writer but this story just wrote itself. The characters came to me instantly. I didn't even have to think about what they looked like. The colour of their skin was already there in my head. I didn't plan it. I didn't research it. But I may have read a newspaper here and there."
