Richard Preston's The Hot Zone should be seen as a dramatization of the story of the Ebola virus, rather than as an objective scientific study of the virus, its evolution, the course of the disease, etc. This is not to say that the book is inaccurate, only that it presents the virus in a way designed to excite and perhaps also repel the reader. The descriptions of the virus sound at times almost as if the author were writing a Stephen King horror thriller. This is not the way a scientific work on the biology of the Ebola virus should be written, but at the same time the book is accurate about the virus' evolution and it does draw many readers to a look at the virus. Most of these readers would not read a "non-thriller" about a virus, so at least Preston has caused many people to at least dip their toe into the fascinating world of biology.
There is much in the book which is dramatically created or recreated and much of this material is character-oriented rather than biology-oriented. When he does cover biological aspects, however, he does present the facts but in a dramatized fashion, in order to satisfy the needs of the reader for a fast-paced page-turner:
The other patients in the waiting room stand up and move away from the man on the floor, calling for a doctor. Pools of blood spread out around him, enlarging rapidly. Having destroyed its host, the hot agent is now coming out of every orifice, "trying" to find a new host (24).
Preston puts quotation marks around the word "trying" because he is trying to make it clear that the virus does not have an intelligence that would allow it to be "trying" to reach another host.
At the same time, even with those quotation marks, it is difficult for a reader not to immediately think of the "Alien" movies and connect the monsters in those movies to the Ebola virus. This is not good biology, of course, although it might be good writing for a thriller. The virus does not have the i...