POST is a very different novel from those you’ve written before, where did the inspiration come from? Please tell us a bit about the book.
Hello! Thanks for having me back – I love visiting SFF world. POST started as a short story, but it never felt finished – the short story is pretty much the first chapter of the finished book, with only a few tweaks. You can actually read the first chapter online. What happened next is that my character wanted more story…and so I gave her more.
Here’s the setting (imagine me wearing my futurist hat): One of our possible futures is a world that has been heavily damaged by climate change, poor politicians, economic challenges, disease, you name it. We have a lot of problems, and we’re only facing some of them well. So if we assume a set of bad things happens in the future, enough to cause real pain but not enough to destroy us, what next? POST is a novel of discovery, and a novel of re-birth. Not that it’s utopian – there are fights to be had and dangers to overcome. I set POST in the Pacific Northwest because it’s home for me, and it’s also a place with enough natural resources and few enough people that it might come through disaster better than, say, Phoenix.
It’s also a travel adventure story that represents a mild argument with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. McCarthy’s book is both brilliant enough and depressing enough to need a talking with. So it’s a travel story, a family story, a coming-of-age story, an adventure…
This is also your first venture into YA fiction, how do you find that experience different?
Well, really, the Silver Ship and the Sea is almost YA. POST might even be almost-YA as well. I think of it as the book I would have reached for as a precocious teen. I think that the time of becoming—when all the world is open to us and we have so much energy that we can barely contain it—is a fascinating moment.
Teenaged protagonists are not really new for me—I just tend to grow them up across a series. Ruby Martin in The Creative Fire started as an older teen and ended as a full adult, Chelo in Silver Ship is an adult by the end of the series. If POST spawns more books, they will be closer together and the whole series would be about teens.
Can you tell us something about your non-fiction work?
I’m desperate to save the world. Really. I only have some published non-fiction, although it’s been in great publications like Slate and Crosscut. I’m working on more—I’m quite disturbed by the things I read when I study biodiversity loss for specific keystone species like orcas and elephants and even more numerous animals like birds and frogs. There are so many ways we could do better in the world—and sometimes not only at little to no cost to us, but with gains. I want to be part of the conversation that helps us get to a place where we have a good future. Right now—we don’t. Right now we have almost doomed ourselves and many others species to extinction. And it’s fixable!
What does it mean to be a futurist? How do you apply that to the now?
For me, being a futurist is really about talking about, contemplating, and caring about the future. I have two deep interests: Conservation and exploration (space, anyone?).
Thinking about the future absolutely applies to now. By definition, goals are in the future. Personal goals, family goals, national goals. Even international goals. We decided—through the UN goals—to greatly lower the amount of poverty in the world, and we did it. We—most of us—are working on ways to preserve biodiversity and to mitigate climate change. We need to do those things, and every one of us owns some decisions that affect those goals. Even small decisions matter. One of my favorite futurists, Glen Hiemstra at Futurist.com, ends most of his talks by reminding us that future is not something that happens to us—it’s something we create.
Currently you are in the midst of a Kickstarter, created by the publisher, eSpec Books. Can you tell us something about that experience?
Sure – I’ve already said a lot of good things on my website. So I’ll just say three things now…..
1. It’s really hard work. Even though Danielle at eSpecBooks did all of the hard work to design the Kickstarter and is doing most of the marketing, I feel obliged to help. And I pretty much hate marketing. The Kickstarter gives me a ticking clock and forces me to put myself out there is ways I am not really comfortable with. I have to say “Buy my book; I think it’s good.” I do think it’s good, and I do want people to buy it, but it’s still hard for me to say so.
2. I already had a great experience with a small press. My collection, Cracking the Sky, came out from Fairwood Press. Patrick Swenson (Fairwood’s publisher, a great writer, and a dear friend) hauls his author’s books all over the Northwest and Canada selling at almost every convention. He even drove books to Kansas for Worldcon. But understandably, he doesn’t often get to the East coast. Working with eSpec will give me more reach from people who hand-sell my work, and who keep it in print more easily. Working with Patrick made me feel like it would be okay to take a risk and work with eSpec, which is really in the startup phase (although Danielle and Mike do have a lot of experience since they worked with other small presses and have been editing for a long time). I also really liked Danielle when I met her.
3. Frankly, this was a way to get this book out. We tried traditional marketing, and I think the book is so different from my other work that it created a challenge. But I love the characters and the story and the setting, and I wanted to get it out. This is a way to do that. These days, it’s smart to develop many paths to publication.
What is the next literary adventure you have planned?
I’m working on my next novel for Pyr, which is also set in a near-future Pacific Northwest, but in a completely different scenario where fabulous cities control a world that is otherwise being re-wilded.
If there was one thing you could change in the world as it is today, what would that be and why?
I’d have people realize how interconnected we are with nature, and willing to change to protect it. We don’t even have to sacrifice—we just have to change. If we can do that, and if Elon Musk can get us out into the solar system, we’ll be living in my preferred future. My bet is on Elon for sure—I don’t have to change anything there. But it’s going to take a small miracle to change humanity enough that we start respecting the beautiful biodiversity that surrounds us.
To learn more about Brenda Cooper’s POST, or to support the campaign, visit http://tiny.cc/Novels2016
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Interview by Danielle Ackley-McPhail
