Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/11/19/the-big-idea-holly-seddon/

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If everyone had less than an hour to live, would your actions in those moments matter more or not at all? Author Holly Seddon explores this question in the Big Idea for her newest novel 59 Minutes, taking a closer look at whether people are capable of being kind and good up until their last breath. When the rules no longer apply, who would you choose to be?

HOLLY SEDDON:

The terrifying premise of 59 Minutes is that everyone in the UK receives an alert to say nuclear missiles are on their way, and the characters have a race against time to get to their loved ones to say goodbye. I’m very proud of this hook, I know it grabs people’s attention. 

But the theme, the big idea, behind the hook is, How do people behave when all the usual rules no longer apply? 

This has always interested me. It’s what draws us to shows like The Sopranos, where characters operate in a world that eschews the rules most of us live by, often running within the guard rails of a whole different set of rules. It’s why films like The Purge are so compelling. 

But even if the rules go up in smoke, I have to believe, as a human trying to negotiate my way through this life, that most people are good and well-meaning. 

So, in writing 59 Minutes, I was in a constant dialogue between that good and bad human impulse. The selfless and the selfish. 

Because some people really would use their last minutes to do terrible things. A last hurrah. You only have to look at the boom in crimes that happened under the cover of darkness in the blacked out London of World War Two to know that. Muggings. Sexual assault. Even murder. The serial killer Gordon Cummins who murdered four women and attempted to murder two more over a six-day period in 1942. 

But I have to believe that plenty of people, plenty more people, would have sacrificed their own safety to help other people. They always do. 

When I first had the idea for 59 Minutes, and started to cautiously tell people the premise to gauge their reaction, I noticed the same thing happened repeatedly. Their eyes would glaze over, they’d clearly stop listening to me waffling on and then they’d snap back to attention and apologize. What they said next was always a variation on the same thing. “I’m sorry, I was just thinking what the hell I would do.” 

I understood. That is the universality of the hook – every one of us if forced to confront extinction would have somewhere we wanted to be, some people with whom we wanted to spend those last minutes. But what if, like in the novel, it’s not that simple. What if missing children need help, do you stop and lose those minutes? What if you are forced to choose between your own safety, and the safety of someone you loved? 

In writing this book and asking my readers to consider such existential questions, I couldn’t shy away from them myself. I’d like to think that, if not brave, I would at least be kind right up to the end. But we all like to think we’d be heroic, don’t we? 

So what about you? What would you do if the usual rules of the world just no longer applied. How would you spend your final minutes? 

59 Minutes: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s|Simon & Schuster

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https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/11/19/the-big-idea-holly-seddon/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58312