The
Writer’s Life
(Editor’s
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Q: Welcome to
''The Writer's Life''. Now that your novel THE HEATSTROKE LINE
has been published, we’d love to find out more about the process. Can we begin by having you take us at the
beginning? Where did you come up with
the idea to write your book?
EDWARD RUBIN: I
was talking to a colleague at Vanderbilt Law School who is one of the leading
legal experts in the U.S. about climate change and its potential
consequences. Frustrated by the failure
of Congress and the American public to listen to experts and take the issue
seriously, he suddenly exclaimed: “I wonder if a work of fiction would be more
convincing than academic articles of the sort I’m writing.” That evening, when I was working at my
computer, I remembered what he said and started sketching out the situation for
a novel about climate change. I worked
on it off and on for a few days, not knowing whether I would continue, and
then, all of a sudden, the situation and the characters came to life for me.
The rest of it just flowed.
Q: How hard was
it to write a book like this and do you have any tips that you could pass on
which would make the journey easier for other writers?
What made the book easy for me to write,
once the situation and the characters took shape, was my familiarity with
science fiction, the genre to which the book belongs. I’m a life-long reade and
now I teach a political science course called “Visions of the Future in Science
Fiction” to undergraduates at Vanderbilt.
I got some specific ideas from the books I’ve read, a few borrowed and
others reconfigured, but even more importantly, I felt that I was able to draw
energy and power from the current of collective creativity that the genre as a
whole provides.
I think nearly all literature, in addition to being about the
subject matter it presents and the society to which it belongs, is about
literature itself. As soon as you start
writing – and this is true of fiction or non-fiction -- you are in dialogue
with all the people who have written related works before you. So my advice to any writer would be to
immerse yourself in your field and read as much of it as possible. As you do so, I think, you will find that
certain works seem to speak to you, and these deserve particular
attention. In my case, the book that
energized and inspired me the most was The
Space Merchants, by Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth. It’s the first book, as far as I know,
depicting a negative future that results from resource depletion. Written during the McCarthy period, and
featuring characters called “Consies” (short for conservationists) who start
out as terrorists and end up as the heroes, it is also a courageous book that
speaks out against the hatreds and short-sightedness of its time. I hope my book can do the same.
Q: Who is your
publisher and how did you find them?
I wrote a blog piece for Salon about
climate change and the unwillingness of the American public confront what Al
Gore has correctly called “an inconvenient truth.” In the blog, I noted that the current public
seems to have an enormous appetite for disaster stories -- books like Earth Abides, Oryx and Crake, The Road,
and Station Eleven, or movies such as
Max Mad, The Postman, Planet of the Apes,
and Waterworld. Why then, I asked, are we so averse to
thinking about the real disaster that awaits us. My speculation was that these
post-apocalyptic books and movies, good as many of them are, use the disaster they
envision to clear away the government control and technological complexity of
the modern world so they can tell an adventure story with long journeys by foot
and hand to hand combat. They don’t deal
with the reality of a disaster like climate change that will degrade our lives
and destroy our hopes without freeing us from the intricacies of modern
existence. A few days after the blog
appeared, I received an email from Dan Bloom, who invented the term “cli-fi”
and runs a blog about the subject. “Why
don’t you write a novel of the kind you tell us isn’t being written,” Dan
wrote. I wrote back and said “I have”
and Dan wrote back and said “Send it to me.”
He read it, liked it a lot, and got it published two weeks later with
Sunbury Press.
Q: Is there
anything that surprised you about getting your first book published?
Once I saw the
book in print, some of it seemed to mean something beyond what I had intended
when I wrote it. I’ve written many
non-fiction books and articles, but I hadn’t experienced this before. For example, the main character, a professor
of entomology, travels to the American South (below “the heatstroke line”) to
combat an infestation of two-inch long flesh eating insects. Once there, he is captured, forced to work in
a laboratory, and placed in the private home of a family with two
daughters. The older one, named Deborah,
is an enigmatic, astonishingly perceptive person who is able to make the main
character realize things about himself that he never knew before. She is in the process of writing a novel of
her own and a portion of that novel appears as one chapter in my book. Her novel is a piece of typical
post-apocalyptic fiction, envisioning a world where small groups of people live
inside an enormous underground computer that controlled a previous society,
while the surface of the planet has returned to being a primitive jungle. I
used this story-within-a-story to provide a contrast with the book I was
writing, and alert the reader to the way in which my book deals with the
reality of climate change disaster, rather than using it as a device to tell an
adventure tale. But when I saw the book
in print, I realized that it also described my own views about personal enlightenment
and paralleled the famous cave analogy in Plato’s Republic, which I teach to undergraduates at Vanderbilt. So Deborah made me realize things about
myself that I never knew before.
Q: What other
books (if any) are you working on and when will they be published?
I’m writing
another science fiction novel, which will also be published by Sunbury. The main character is a man who runs a French
restaurant in a human settlement on a distant planet, and whose sister happens
to have become the dictator of a newer settlement on a neighboring planet. The
action also centers on people’s response to an environmental disaster, although
in this case it’s something other than global warming. For my day job, which is as a professor of
law and political science at Vanderbilt University, I’m writing a book about
the theory of democracy and a treatise on administrative law for Oxford
University Press.
Q: What’s one
fact about your book that would surprise people?
The small number
of people who are clinging to life below the heatstroke line, and who capture
the main character, turn out to be frenetic, obsessive American patriots. Even though they are barely surviving, they
spend a great deal of their time and energy trying to convince themselves that
America can be great again. They mount
an elaborate parade to celebrate the Battle of the Bulge, and the man in whose
home the main character is placed (Deborah’s father) runs a government agency
that makes sure that people only cook American-style food. This might surprise many readers, but it has
a basis in reality. When a nation has
experienced a catastrophic decline or is dominated by another nation, its
people often resort to excessive patriotism as a means of denying their current
reality. This often leads to tragedy,
and it does so in my book as well.
Q: Finally, what
message are you trying to get across with your book?
The book is
centered around a message, which is that our country will suffer catastrophe if
we fail to take action to slow down global warming. I think many of the climate change deniers,
who now include the President of the United States and a majority of the U.S.
Congress, think that increased temperatures will only cause suffering in remote
tropical places. They are tragically wrong; if the process continues at its
present pace, our coastal cities will suffer repeated inundations due to storm
surges, average temperatures during the summer months will render the southern
part of the country (where climate change denial is currently most prevalent)
nearly uninhabitable, and droughts will devastate our agricultural
production. The resulting population
dislocations, economic decline and disaster-related fatalities will subject our
political system to enormous stress. I
doubt it will be able to survive in its present form, and that is what I depict
in the book. If there are any nations that will benefit from increased
temperatures, it isn’t the U.S. but more northerly ones, such as Canada,
Greenland, and Russia. I also depict
this in the book. The U.S. has broken up
into small, warring principalities and it is dominated by a more populous
Canadian nation, which has taken Alaska away from us. The book was written to confront people with
the reality of the oncoming disaster, and to induce them to take action to
prevent it.
Q: Thank you
again for this interview! Do you have
any final words?
Although my day
job is as a university professor writing factual work (at least I hope it’s
factual), I believe fiction can be a powerful force for good. It can encourage people to sympathize with
those who are different from them, alert people to dangers that they may not
recognize, and impel them to take beneficial action. I hope my book can serve that function.
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