Veronica Roth: Let’s start off with a little geekery! What are your favorite examples of sci-fi in popular culture? And if one of them isn’t Battlestar Galactica, you and I may need to have some kind of BSG marathon. I’ll bring the Cheetos!

Walter Jury: Ha! You may need to bring over some DVD box sets and some Cheetos. But don’t worry, I’ll have Milk Duds ready for you! My faves run the gamut from sci-fi fantasy to grounded sci-fi thrillers. In the bookstore, I love Michael Crichton and his brand of science-based fiction—ask me if I can I wait until the upcomingJurassic World film? No! Recently, I have fallen in love with the work of Patrick Lee of the Breach series. Runner just came out—don’t walk, run to your local bookstore for that one! As far as films, my all-timers includeTerminator and T2, District 9, Elysium (and likely anything Neill Blomkamp ever does), Minority Report, 12 Monkeys, and Looper. Time travel is 

 something I love, as well as just a good old-fashioned sci-fi chase!

I want to throw this very same question back at you in regard to your inspiration for Divergent. Were there particular films, books, TV series you can point to that inspired you?

VR: District 9 is one of my favorites, too! But you’ve given me some to add to my watching/reading list. As for Divergent, it’s always hard for me to identify direct inspirations for anything I do. My first introduction to dystopian fiction was The Giver, by Lois Lowry, so that’s definitely an influence. And my interest in simulated realities probably comes from The Matrix. I found that 1984 helped me quite a bit to shape the fear landscapes—that whole rat mask thing, it really tapped into a kind of primal terror that I tried to access when I was writing about Tris and the birds in her first fear simulation.