We don’t know what to do with that anymore. And at the time we just kept talking about our children’s world, and that’s too abstract.Īnd yet, as the real-world consequences of catastrophic planetary change have become more real and more present and more immediate, we’ve fallen into that other trap that you mentioned which is, we’ve heard that story already and we’re inured to it, we’ve grown too familiar with the real. I mean, the earliest warnings about climate change date back to more than half a century ago. Something that unfolds more gradually in the background on a much larger scale can make its way into our intellect, but not into our deeper emotional understanding. We can only take in things that are unfolding, more or less on our physical scale, in more or less on the psychic timescale that we’ve evolved to take in. That to me felt extremely relevant with regard to our relation to climate change. Of the many life-giving planets you create through this narrative device, the one that stood out to me the most was the one in which there is an intelligent life form somewhere out there that moves at a speed so different from us that we can’t comprehend it. Throughout the book, Theo, an astrobiologist whose job is to essentially formulate hypotheses of what life might look like on other planets, talks out these potential worlds with his son, Robin. One of the things that kept coming up for me when I was reading was this idea of trying to help people come to terms with the incomprehensible.

And by putting the Earth on a slightly different trajectory, I was hoping to intensify and to make real again a lot of the things that we readers would probably simply gloss over because we’ve already discounted them as familiar. I guess it’s what Brecht would call the estrangement effect, where the realistic is made unusual again by just slightly changing the perspective from which you view it. Richard Powers: I was thinking a little bit along the lines of the form that science fiction writers like to call the “near-term future,” where the story treats a world that’s a lot like ours, but set in some undesignated time in the future, in a way that allows the writer to speculate about the potential of the present to unfold in different ways.

The overstory richard