Stranger Than Fiction

[Laughs.] Good question. What environmental journalists do for me, at least, is that they're a lot like magpies picking at roadkill. You see them up ahead, you see them swirling around, and you know something interesting is coming up. Environmental journalists are unearthing things that we don't necessarily want to look at, but they're powerful and important things that we need to know about. So what they report provides almost perfect fodder for stories, mostly because they can only take the stories so far. Environmental journalists point the way toward saying, "The world is changing." What I can do with science fiction, then, is say, "Well, let's see how that looks."

The speculative process, the process of going two or three steps down the road beyond what you can actually report, oftentimes [gives us] the information we really need to know. And it seems like scientists are inherently conservative, and science journalists are inherently conservative, because you don't want to be wrong. But that's where I can get involved as a science fiction writer. I don' t have to be right, exactly, [but] I need to illustrate. I need to illustrate a feeling or experience so that people can say, "Does that seem like something we want to be going toward?"

With "The Tamarisk Hunter," I was doing that with drought. The Colorado River is perennially drought-ridden, but recently, as the Glen Canyon Dam, as Lake Powell, gets lower and lower, we see this trend going on. And at some level we're aware of it, but we're not really dealing with that in any concrete way. But you can look at that and say, "Huh, if that dam keeps getting drained, what happens next?" So with a story like "The Tamarisk Hunter," I create a situation where we really do run out of a lot of water, and where the drought is deep and long-lasting and brutal, and then I start speculating about how human beings will deal with this, and whether or not they're going to be generous and sharing with their water, or whether they're going to treat it like a scarce resource and fight over it.

In some ways the problems seem so complex and so large that it's hard to pull the Rachel Carson [approach of] "Look, here's the problem, let's fix it," both because they're international problems and because we seem to have lost some of our political will or human interest in these things. So maybe finding other ways to tell those stories so that they're still interesting, and can engage a public, is science journalism's next big challenge.

Science fiction, traditionally, is very much a technophilic sort of literature. And I'm much more of a technophobe -- I'm not quite a Luddite, but I'm definitely not a techno champion. And sci-fi has always been in that space, thrived in that space of, "Hey, if we're competent people and we're smart, we can, by gum, get something done here." When I look at our problems, many of them are actually techno-problems -- we don't create techno-fixes, we create techno problems. So within the genre I tend to sit as an outlier, because I'm writing mostly about where things went wrong, and where we need to rethink our techno love. That puts me at odds with a lot of what you see in the genre. So even though I'm using the tools of science fiction, I often see myself as an environmental writer.

It's a perfect solution! It's a perfect solution!

Technology doesn't provide wisdom. And when I look at my stories, what I'm really writing about is, "Are we wise? And will we be wise? And how do we be wise?" Mostly those are hard choices. They aren't quick-and-easy, let's get another gadget together. And so yeah, with "The People of Sand and Slag," it's explicitly saying, "Yes, we can have all the tech we want, and it will not make us wise."

My natural zone is dystopic. And that's partly informed by what I read, thanks to you guys writing such depressing stories about what's happening in the world.

Reading a lot of your writing, I have this moment of fear, and that fear is what drives me to write. You guys pick up rocks and look under them and tell us things we don't want to know about -- you have all these creepy-crawlies that you keep discovering. All the work I've been doing is to examine those creepy-crawlies. Now I'm starting to think about what to do next. The utopic side of science fiction [is] saying well, wait, maybe there's a way that we can move toward something more positive.

[Laughs.] Give up on the adults! Give up on the adults! I know so few adults that live in a sustainable way right now. But kids still are malleable, kids still have an opportunity to say "Wait, no, I'm going to live a different way."