Eiren Caffell discusses her novel All the Water in the World

This is a machine-generated transcript. There will be errors. The audio recording is the record of this episode.

Lee Schneider (00:18.88)
So in your book, we experience this worldwide climate disaster, but you tell the story through a very personal close-up lens, a family lens. So I'm leading up to the memorist question, but it's a few questions down the road, but building to it. what I do want to know is, did you start that way? Did it evolve into that? Why the personal lens?

Eiren Caffall (00:45.494)
Yeah, it started that way. I mean, part of it is because I had been writing about ecological collapse as a journalist mostly through personal narrative up to that point. And I'd been doing a lot of study and research around what was happening in sort of the contemporary oceans. And I tended to find that my strengths as a writer were about

how the emotional experience of loss and catastrophe worked on the individual person. In family structures and parenting, I have a legacy family of people interested in climate and in science. My mother was a hydrogeologist for the EPA. So I was kind of raised in this space of like experiencing ecological collapse. And then I was writing about it myself while I was raising my young child. And so every

place that I went to was always really grounded in how were we processing it, how are experiencing it, how are we experiencing it in the places we specifically loved. mean it's such a huge issue and a global experience shared by everyone on the planet, but everyone has a place that they love and adore and know really well that is showing signs of what's here already and what's to come.

So my writing has always really dwelled on that and so does the novel.

I think that the problem of trying to write about climate apocalypse is that it tends to be something that gets retold in these enormous set pieces. And I think that that can often be a problem in terms of science communication generally around the climate catastrophe or ecological collapse, that we see it in these really large pictures and these enormous events that are often much too complicated for people to feel like they can get their hands around or take in.

it's a much more effective means of storytelling and processing what we're all going through if we think about it from a personal level.

Lee Schneider (00:59.758)
And the Museum of Natural History, I have to ask. I'm from New York and spent a lot of time there. So, and I know you have a connection also. Just talk a little bit about why museums and why that museum.

Eiren Caffall (01:09.218)
Yeah, so my mother was an EPA scientist and my father was a maker of shaker furniture. So from my birth, I was being taken to museums all over the Northeast. And my family was originally from New York City. My dad was born in Jersey City, my mom in Manhattan, I was born in Manhattan. And so we went back at least a couple of times a year to go visit family. And my favorite place to go was the Museum of Natural History. And I had that thing that all the kids who have gone there,

have, which is what would it be like if I could live here? What would it be like if I could have access to this by myself after dark and really form an intimacy with it? So that really came back to me while I was germinating the idea for the book, especially because my own kid was obsessed with museums also, and we lived just a bus ride away from the Field Museum in Chicago. I think until I came to the department and started to be there at least once a week throughout

Lee Schneider (01:51.288)
we do.

Eiren Caffall (02:06.158)
childhood. So I was spending all of this time exploring that museum, going behind the scenes at nights and, you know, building this.

Lee Schneider (00:02.712)
You're the author of The Weight of Memory.

Eiren Caffall (00:10.843)
Okay, great.

Eiren Caffall (00:20.456)
Okay, let's see if that works.

Lee Schneider (00:29.544)
which is about a family in deeply personal terms. It's a memoir. Now, how did the experience of that book inform your writing of this book?

Eiren Caffall (00:40.264)
The Mourner's Bestiary. Yeah. That book and this book were being written essentially at the same time. I think that I first had the title for The Mourner's Bisturi a little bit before I began writing the novel, but essentially I was already sort of thinking about what it was going to be like to write about ocean science and my family in relation to ocean science and in relation to...

a genetic kidney disease that we carry pretty much around the same time that I was germinating the idea for the novel. And what I basically did was for, it took me about 10 years to write the novel so I wasn't writing the memoir in earnest the entire time but I was writing essays that would sort of again kind of become that memoir. So when I would finish a draft of the novel I would go back to the nonfiction side of things and the contemporary side of things. And I always really saw these two books in conversation with each other.

One is about a small vulnerable family on the edge of a vast ocean in the contemporary moment of collapse, really telling a story about how protecting vulnerable creatures in the marine ecosystem and vulnerable people within our common experience of society and culture really can result in saving things that might otherwise be lost, saving human life.

Lee Schneider (02:04.078)
Mm.

Eiren Caffall (02:05.192)
saving animal life, saving ecosystems. And so I was telling that story in the non-fiction and then in the fiction I was telling obviously a much more of a thriller version where there's a big adventure and there's, you know, a birch bark canoe going up the Hudson River. But it's essentially still the same story. It's a small vulnerable family that has an illness at the core of it that has a lot of loss that's trying to figure out how to make a way forward to save what can be saved in the face of great

catastrophe and writing the contemporary book, you know, obviously I'm deeply engaged in what we could do at this moment to prevent the worst impacts of climate change. And I'm talking to a lot of scientists who are working on that as well. But I wanted to bring that same energy to the novel as well, because I think I've spent enough time in my life with scientists who are, you know, really committed, have committed their lives and their life's work to the possibility.

that we can save a great deal either in terms of populations which have chronic illness or in terms of populations of animals or ecosystems themselves. so having those two conversations going at the same time, one from the contemporary moment and one from a possible worst case scenario future felt really important to me.

Lee Schneider (03:26.872)
Wow. Now I wasn't expecting that answer. So that's pretty cool. Kind of the parallel development. Your book first surprised me because I encountered it first in the wild in a Barnes and Noble in Manhattan Beach, California. We were evacuated from the fires here in January. So, well, what was interesting is here we were, it's three of us, small family on the run from a climate.

Eiren Caffall (03:39.912)
Fantastic.

not fantastic. Yeah.

Eiren Caffall (03:52.722)
Yeah.

Lee Schneider (03:55.023)
Emergency a climate disaster and there's this book we we had smoke and fire the book has water But it really resonated obviously, right? It was prominently displayed by the way, you'll be glad to know Yes So really I've been thinking about how families cope with climate disaster. So here's my question finally Maybe it's the role of this kind of climate fiction to show us the way

Eiren Caffall (03:56.358)
Yep, yep.

water.

Yeah.

Delighted to know, yes.

Eiren Caffall (04:15.154)
Yeah. Yeah.

Lee Schneider (04:23.086)
put our protagonists in harm's way and show them working their way out of it or not and show what they learn. So what do you think of that?

Eiren Caffall (04:29.052)
Yes. Yes. I think you're completely right and actually that was a huge part of the project that I was engaged in while I was writing it. I I was a single mom when I started writing the novel. My kid was very little. I have this genetic kidney disease that I may have passed on to my kid. We were living in, you know, relative poverty sort of in the wake of this divorce.

And every day my mom was sending me these articles about what could happen in the worst case scenarios of climate collapse. And my kid was born just a few months before Hurricane Katrina. And what really started this book for me was getting a call from my godfather who was living still in Brooklyn and whose daughter had a house in Red Hook. And when Hurricane Sandy came through, he spent his nights and days trying to get the

the ocean out of her basement. And so I had this very keen feeling of I have a vulnerable family. We already are at the edge of what we can handle. What would it look like if we were stuck in a situation as dire as I've seen play out in other parts of the country? And so I was having trouble sleeping myself. I didn't feel like I was reading anything that really did for me what I wanted to have done, which was I wanted someone to say to me,

the lessons that you have as a family that survived other kinds of losses, and the determination and the hope and the power of science and the power of communities coming together is actually everything that you need in your toolbox to survive what could possibly come to your community in the future. I needed somebody to write that, so since I couldn't find it, I decided that I would write my, essentially write myself a bedtime story.

about what it would look like for my own family in slightly different clothes to go through this. And it's interesting that you mention finding this book during the fires because my first event for this book that was outside of Chicago was two weeks after the fires started in Los Angeles at a bookstore there. And I had actually launched the book on the day the fire started.

Lee Schneider (06:36.462)
Mm.

Eiren Caffall (06:44.71)
So it was the exact same moment. I vividly remember being in Barnes and Noble for the launch event and a good friend of mine whose sister lived in LA coming up to me and said, have you been watching the news? So it's impossible as a writer about climate collapse to ever get away from people tagging you and things and sort of like, did you see the flood? What do you think about it? That's been happening to me for decades now, but there was something really personal about having that first experience be staying in my friend's house who were.

well away from the fires, but you know being in a bookstore with people who like you had just had to evacuate, a man came up to me at the signing line and said I really wanted my wife to read this but her house burned down so she's gonna need a minute. And it wasn't lost on me that I wasn't far from you know where Octavia Butler lived and wrote and you know Parable of the Sower is such an important book in terms of again that sort of future casting of thinking about what might come in a

possible future of fire. And the next books I'm writing are both about fire, so I feel like I've kind of been immersed in that in the the wake of putting out my water book.

Lee Schneider (07:52.355)
Hmm. Wow. You state that so well. it makes me think that climate novels can lean into a dystopian vision. But this book is not like that. And listeners, you should pick up a copy of this book because it's not like that. A bedtime story is an interesting way of thinking about it. We really feel a family connection and see them develop the resilience together and.

Eiren Caffall (08:19.377)
you

Lee Schneider (08:20.748)
That's very, not only moving, but it's kind of a way forward. There's a note of optimism. So I don't really have a question in there unless you want to add to that.

Eiren Caffall (08:29.872)
No, think, no, you're absolutely right. And I think that, you know, some of my favorite writers who deal with climate futures are people like Kim Stanley Robinson, right? Who are talking about not just the catastrophe that we're facing, but also what does it look like to make community and to come together in the face of worst case scenarios to be able to mitigate them or to be able to save what we can. I don't, you know, that, that storyline was incredibly important to me because while I am a great consumer of disaster literature,

and disaster films with enormous glee and I enjoy them. A book about a shipwreck is my idea of a vacation. But what I love about doing this kind of work is that I was raised by somebody who was really interested in utopias, right? My father was obsessed with all of the utopias that had happened in the Northeast in the 1800s and he had this huge library. We went to sites of these experimental communities over and over again in my childhood and

Lee Schneider (09:06.04)
haha

Eiren Caffall (09:27.002)
One of the things he said to me all the time which has made its way into the novel is utopias fail. And so I wanted to try to bridge the gap between what people write in terms of devastating futures. I didn't want to write a dystopia and I didn't want to write an apocalypse. I also didn't want to write a utopia because I don't believe in that. What I wanted to write was something much more like what Rebecca Solnit writes about in A Paradise Built in Hell, which is she writes...

really deeply about the historical record of the ways in which people have come together in the face of disaster to create communities of care and beloved communities and kind of push back against this very American kind of neoliberal idea of the perpetual chaos of collapse. I don't think that's how humans are really built. We're not built for the perpetual chaos of bleak, disordered, endless now of predation and loss. We're actually really built for

What do we do after? How do we remake? How do we rebuild? And it seemed to me that there needed to be stories that not only included the complexity of the kinds of humans that end up in disasters, know, disabled people, different races, different classes coming together in these spaces, but also we needed to be able to talk about how people remake the world because they have hope for something, because they dream about what the world is going to be like on the other side of the worst thing.

That's always been something that's been part of my own family because we live with an incurable disease, right? And we lose people in our generations. And there's a relay race where we hand off to the next generation, okay, I may not live as long as I want to, I may not finish this, but here is what the hope looks like for you. Here is how your generation can have a better outcome physically in our illness, but also can carry forward the ideas of who we are as a family and what we want to achieve.

Lee Schneider (10:57.453)
Mm.

Lee Schneider (11:20.32)
It really brings to mind this utopian vision from the individual view, not a top-down. And this has some resonance with Butler, who you brought up, and some, although Kim Stanley Robinson, maybe not as much, but the idea that this utopia starts first with a small group of people or one person maybe, and they start to figure out how to get to the next step.

Eiren Caffall (11:28.486)
Yeah.

Eiren Caffall (11:32.04)
Mm-hmm.

Eiren Caffall (11:42.844)
Yeah. Yeah.

Eiren Caffall (11:49.436)
Yeah. And also, you know, in the ways in which utopias fail is because utopias really are, generally speaking, they are top-down. They have to be. There's an ethos, there's a leader, there's a sort of an idea behind what a utopia looks like. But communities, on the other hand, they are based on what the human beings that are creating them make together, and they have to be flexible. And I think one of the reasons my dad always said to me that utopias fail is because utopias can become extremely rigid over time because they're based on a single vision.

whereas a community working together has the flexibility not only to respond to new crises, but also to respond to what's working in the community and what's not. And so in writing the novel, I really wanted to place a community on the roof of this museum trying to protect something. They all had a vision of what they wanted to achieve together, but it was flexible enough to allow people to come and go. allowed people to do different types of work within that. It had to respond to new...

facets of the evolution of the crisis, had to break up eventually. And I think that's really what's true about communities that work at even the smallest level of a family, but also at the larger level of like, what does it look like when we rebuild a larger community that can encompass and support more people?

Lee Schneider (13:05.332)
Right. I want to bring in Ursula Le Guin here, another great thinking of the dispossessed and the word for world as forest, where she really shows that it's incumbent upon individuals, that it's not a guru driven, prescriptive top down thing, as I said before, but it's really coming from individuals with a vision who maybe it's kind of messy at first.

Eiren Caffall (13:07.845)
yeah.

Yeah.

Eiren Caffall (13:15.269)
Yeah.

Eiren Caffall (13:26.214)
Yes. Yes.

Eiren Caffall (13:33.102)
Yes.

Lee Schneider (13:34.434)
You know, that's what she does so well. That's what I enjoy about her work so much is that it's not clean. It's not this or that. It's kind of a mess. The people are messy, but their solutions are pretty clear. It's interesting.

Eiren Caffall (13:38.524)
Yeah. Yeah.

Eiren Caffall (13:44.186)
Yes.

Yeah, I absolutely agree. I'm a huge fan of her work and an admirer of her spirit and her sensibility because I think that's part of what makes her books and Octavia Butler and, you know, even Madeline Langell, who I grew up on as kid, you know, these are not easy answers that are being handed by these writers to the problems that they've created within the books, within the worlds that they're writing. They're aware that it's human beings that are trying to make it work.

And I think as much as we have these stories about the way human beings break things, I love that idea of like, this is about messiness, right? It's about, you know, we have all of us ideas about how we might make it work and then we have to be in conversation with each other. And that is never a straight line. That's always, and it's part of why I wanted to, in the novel, know, Noni and her family, as they're traveling to safety, they encounter a number of different types of

communities that have been built in the wake of all of this turmoil and they work or don't work are more or less, you know, authoritarian are more or less top down depending on what's happened in that community, what they've done together. And it's a little bit of a tour of like, these are the ways people could be responding to this crisis and this question of rebuilding. And I think that's important to have those visions.

Lee Schneider (15:06.402)
Mm-hmm.

Lee Schneider (15:10.094)
Yeah, that was a fun part of the book for me when I was starting to encounter those communities and going, oh, I get it. This is a bit of a tour. We're getting a sample here, which is a nice feeling in a book. You know, like you suddenly kind of get the beat, just kind of figure it out. Speaking of beat, you're a musician. I was listening to Slipping the Holdfast this morning and wondering how, yes, it was fun.

Eiren Caffall (15:18.224)
You

Exactly.

Eiren Caffall (15:28.848)
Yeah. Yeah.

I am. lovely.

Lee Schneider (15:40.321)
I often listen to music, sidebar, often listen to music when I work and Ursula Le Guin famously said, if you're the kind of author who needs to distract yourself by listening to music when you work, perhaps you're in the wrong profession. I won't, I won't take that literally, but no, I won't take that either. But I was wondering how music and writing inform each other or are they two different countries for you?

Eiren Caffall (15:44.328)
Mmm.

Eiren Caffall (15:55.91)
No, I'm not going to take that advice.

Eiren Caffall (16:05.602)
they absolutely inform each other. And I think, you know, they were both things that I knew that I wanted to do with my life from the time I was a really, really little kid. there are, you know, recordings of me making up songs when I'm four and there's notebooks, spiral notebooks of stories that I was writing before I could write when my mother was copying down the ideas for me. So I've always really identified as both. when I was in college, you know, I was

really lucky to go to school during a period of time where we were doing a lot of really great critical theory work in colleges and English departments at the time. And I had this, you know, mentor who was encouraging me to go and get a PhD and do that kind of analysis. I think I would really have loved it, but I had this sense that my lifelong ambition to write books and to make music was going to be

irrevocably changed if I didn't let myself go and kind of use the emotional part of my creativity for a while and get out of my head, you know, not be quite so intellectually based. I love research. I love a good idea. I love a big sentence. But being a musician for 10 years really required me to think about emotions first and to let the collaborative nature of being a musician change me as an artist so that I

Lee Schneider (17:12.163)
Mm.

Eiren Caffall (17:34.522)
understood how to take direction from the people that I was working with to know when a thing was working or when it wasn't, when I was getting to deep emotional resonances in my work or when I was not. And I took all of that information into beginning to write long form again. You know, I think I really use those lessons in terms of sequencing, you know, my chapters and sequencing information as it's delivered in a book, very much like I would

make a record. And also I'm still writing songs and you know I have enough for another record and I'm just sort of like trying to find the time to get back in the studio. So I think I'll always really benefit from the way in which that collaborative art form really reminds me that it's bass, writing, which we always talk about as this really solitary endeavor, is not. It's about the communities that you make who are going to help you to

really ensure your vision lands with a reader outside of yourself. That the emotional resonances are the most important thing for anybody.

Lee Schneider (18:36.622)
Hmm.

Lee Schneider (18:42.176)
Another answer I didn't expect, so that's your baton 500. Do you see, you alluded to this for a moment, do you see a musical structure to books like a song? Or is writing like a performance, like singing a ballad?

Eiren Caffall (18:58.48)
Yeah, I really think it's much more like writing a record where, you know, I benefit from having been a stage performer when I do readings, I think, and when I do interviews, because I'm used to being on stage and having to be articulate or brief or, you know, compelling as a person who's in front of an audience. So I'm already kind of comfortable with that because I've gotten over my stage fright, which I had in my twenties. And so like that part of being a musician really helps.

It really helps in terms of performance of my own work. writing a book, you know, I think I didn't discover this about myself until later in terms of myself as a novelist that I like shorter chapters because they work more like songs. They are one particular idea or emotional beat that needs to move through its many colors and then you move on to something else. And when I started understanding that writing

novel felt like that to me. mean the memoir is different because it's much more about like a big idea and a lot of scientific information that needs to be conveyed, but for something that's essentially an emotional project like writing a novel, every one of those chapters needs to feel like it works on its own as its own song and needs to be in conversation with whatever comes next to it so that I'm building an emotional experience over several chapters towards a

you know, a set piece or a crescendo and then I can go through a denouement and then I can figure out how to build again. And looking at it that way, that's not a first draft conversation I'm having with myself. First draft, I'm just trying to get everything onto the page, but like when I come back to adjust and edit and move through, it really helps to have those skills available to me.

Lee Schneider (20:36.365)
Mm-hmm.

Lee Schneider (20:47.862)
I like that about the short chapters being like a song. I have a friend who writes entire novels, but his unit is a short scene. That's all he ever writes. And then of course he goes back and puts them together into something brilliant. But in the beginning, it's that short kind of delivery system of emotion. And it's kind of neat.

Eiren Caffall (21:00.796)
Yeah. Yeah.

Eiren Caffall (21:07.557)
Yeah.

Lee Schneider (21:16.886)
What music do you listen to when you write?

Eiren Caffall (21:20.072)
I mean, it really depends on the project. Like, while I was writing the memoir, I listened to this really beautiful symphony by John Luther Adams called Becoming Ocean. Or Become Ocean, I think. It's really gorgeous contemporary classical music. Often when I'm writing, I listen to non-English speaking performers so that I can totally, like, you understand, right? Like, I definitely want to make sure that I'm not getting distracted by language that I really understand.

Lee Schneider (21:39.626)
I get it. Totally. Yeah.

Eiren Caffall (21:49.176)
So I'm thinking with the novel I listened to, I'm gonna butcher her name, but Arooj Avtaab, she has a couple of really gorgeous records that I listened to. One is called Bird Under Water and one is called Vulture Prince that were on heavy rotation when I was working on the revisions for the novel. And then, you know, there have been points where I've listened to like Schubert when I was doing the first couple of drafts of the book.

Lee Schneider (22:15.534)
Mm-hmm.

Eiren Caffall (22:18.248)
But really it's about whatever can kind of get me into a more of a trance space. So that some part of my brain, the monkey mind, is somewhere else with a project, like listening to music, and the part of me that needs to do the deep work of creation isn't going to be distracted by that very helpful monkey's ideas and thoughts.

Lee Schneider (22:41.23)
Yeah, right. Or even worse, it'll remind me of some place that I should be or had been. You know, I don't want it to bring up memories really that interfere with what I'm working on.

Eiren Caffall (22:47.804)
Yes.

Yes.

Yeah, that's so true. It needs to be something new that I've only listened to in the context of writing, generally speaking. Yeah, that's a really good point.

Lee Schneider (22:59.54)
Yeah, exactly. What does your workspace look like?

Eiren Caffall (23:04.136)
I live in a little workers cottage in Chicago on the northwest side and it's kind of a tumble down palace. We have a little backyard where I've planted a lot of really lovely plants including elderberry tree and dogwood and so I have a view out to the garden from a couple of windows at the back of my office. I have an old laundry table as my desk and a thrifted chair and

I'm currently sitting on a goat skin that belonged to a goat that a goat that belonged to a friend of mine on this little island that I write about called Monhegan. So I feel like I'm getting good energy from my friend and her animals. And then I have a ton of books around me. So it's really, it's off the kitchen, which I think is a very simple, it's a very classic place for working mothers to end up.

doing their work, which is I'm accessible to my family, maybe sometimes too much, but I can turn my back on the kitchen and turn my face towards the outside world and watch the birds and listen to the trees. And I have a ton of pictures up on my walls. I'm a hoarder of the art of my family that has passed away, and so I'm completely surrounded by images, paintings my mother did, posters from my life as a rock musician.

know, those sorts of things that really help me remember who and what I'm writing for.

Lee Schneider (24:30.99)
Beautiful. That's great. My mother was an artist and mostly sculptor and she did make some furniture. She and I work at a standing desk that was actually a bar that she made, but it's been repurposed as a standing desk for me made of a tree. It's one, it's kind of one whole tree that you found by the side of the road. And I'm sitting next to a Nakashima table.

Eiren Caffall (24:36.232)
Eiren Caffall (24:41.081)
lovely.

Eiren Caffall (24:46.756)
hahahaha

Eiren Caffall (24:52.424)
Eiren Caffall (24:56.422)
that's gorgeous.

Eiren Caffall (25:00.511)
Lee Schneider (25:01.208)
that they bought from Mr. Nakashima out of his garage when he was just, you know, some guy making furniture out of trees. So when you said your dad's involvement with shaker furniture, that definitely resonated.

Eiren Caffall (25:04.368)
Wow. Wow.

Eiren Caffall (25:13.456)
Yeah. Yeah, I have a ton of his furniture that I've inherited from various people. And I think if he had lived long enough to see me a working writer, I would probably also have a desk of his manufacturer. But we have our dining table and many other things that get to remind me of his work.

Lee Schneider (25:31.459)
Yeah, these physical things. When we first brought a piece of my mother's furniture into, when she died and we got all the furniture here, some of it, my son, was then, gosh, he must, my middle son, my younger son rather, he must have been about, I'm gonna forget his name, but he was a young child and he immediately laid down on it like he.

Eiren Caffall (25:39.208)
Yeah.

Lee Schneider (25:56.121)
flopped down on and like literally drank up the vibe. I mean, he had never met my mother, but he was like, this means something. This, this hunk of tree means something. Yeah, it was pretty cool. So let me ask my super wide angle question to wrap out is as you see it, what is the state of science fiction and fantasy writing and climate writing and publishing today?

Eiren Caffall (26:03.644)
Yeah...

It means something that's been touched by someone who, yeah, no, that's beautiful.

Eiren Caffall (26:14.792)
Sure.

Eiren Caffall (26:25.318)
Ooh, that's a really big question. I feel like, well, I feel like I'm not qualified to answer that, which is a weird thing to say considering that my book is on science fiction shelves all over the country right now. But I feel like what's really exciting to me is that there feels like there's been an opening towards these books that crossover conversations that don't just get siloed within.

science fiction or literary fiction, you know, my book is hard to categorize and I love that because what that means is that we're being able to think about the great lyricism and the incredible writing that's part of what used to be just regarded as genre. And we're also able to use what used to be regarded as kind of like the high brow literary side of things to talk about issues that are future focused, that are speculative.

I think that's really due to, you know, people like Ursula Le Guin and Octavia Butler like bulldozing through categories many years ago so that we could begin to be more flexible because I really love seeing the creativity and the brilliance that's part of sci-fi and I don't read a lot of fantasy but I do have two very sci-fi obsessed people that I live with.

My husband was a professor teaching sci-fi at the college level many years ago, and we have an extensive sci-fi library that my kid is now obsessed with reading. And so I get to be on road trips listening to them listen to the book on tape of like China Mobile. And, you know, just to see the ways in which it isn't a siloed art form anymore that's sort of over there for people who consider themselves only part of that community, that there's a...

Lee Schneider (27:48.046)
Mm-hmm.

Eiren Caffall (28:10.376)
a widening and a deepening of our relationship to what fiction can do. And I think also that so much beautiful film and fiction is being made now that allows us to have these bigger, deeper conversations about how we want to form our society that even come through the sci-fi lens. We just got done watching Andor and it was such a beautiful piece of art that was so perfect for this contemporary political moment.

and is also sci-fi. And so when something like The Expanse or Andor is able to do that or China Muv-eel, to have these bigger conversations about what's going on in contemporary life and not just to be having them within the genre by itself but to be available and opened to a wider audience is really exciting because those have always been there in science fiction. I was a 14-year-old obsessed with Ray Bradbury. Those were very political themes that were going on.

it wasn't something where I felt like those conversations about those writers were happening in all kinds of literary spaces and I feel like it is now, or at least that's been my experience and it's been really refreshing.

Lee Schneider (29:19.712)
Wonderful, that's beautiful. Are there any other themes that you think we didn't talk about that we should cover?

Eiren Caffall (29:25.896)
No, I mean think those are the major ones. think really what I'm working towards and what I'm working on is trying to create these speculative worlds where I talk about the same things we're struggling with in the world at the moment, which is in the face of collapse, whether it's political, scientific, or ecological, what do we do to save ourselves and each other and to save what we can for the world.

Lee Schneider (29:29.528)
Okay.

Eiren Caffall (29:55.57)
that we really want to make on the other side of it. Disasters are only interesting to me if we also acknowledge that there's recovery from disaster. There's loss, but there's a future that we have to protect.

Lee Schneider (30:09.518)
Beautiful well stated well, thanks so much for joining me today. This was really a lot of

Eiren Caffall (30:15.525)
my gosh, it's been a joy, a delight. Thanks for asking.