The Heatstroke Line: Interview with Sci-Fi/Cli-Fi Author Edward L. Rubin
Edward Rubin is University Professor of Law and Political
Science at Vanderbilt University. He specializes in administrative law,
constitutional law and legal theory. He is the author of Soul, Self and Society: The New
Morality and the Modern State (Oxford, 2015); Beyond Camelot: Rethinking
Politics and Law for the Modern State (Princeton, 2005) and two books with
Malcolm Feeley, Federalism: Political Identity and Tragic Compromise
(Michigan, 2011) and Judicial Policy
Making and the Modern State: How the
Courts Reformed America's Prisons (Cambridge, 1998). In addition, he is the author of two
casebooks, The Regulatory State (with
Lisa Bressman and Kevin Stack) (2nd ed., 2013); The Payments System (with Robert Cooter) (West, 1990), three edited
volumes (one forthcoming) and The
Heatstroke Line (Sunbury, 2015) a science fiction novel about the fate of
the United States if climate change is not brought under control. Professor
Rubin joined Vanderbilt Law
School as Dean and the first John
Wade–Kent Syverud Professor of Law in July 2005, serving a four-year term that
ended in June 2009. Previously, he taught at the University of Pennsylvania Law
School from 1998 to 2005, and at the Berkeley School of Law from 1982 to 1998,
where he served as an associate dean. Professor Rubin has been chair of the
Association of American Law Schools' sections on Administrative Law and
Socioeconomics and of its Committee on the Curriculum. He has served as a
consultant to the People's Republic of China
on administrative law and to the Russian
Federation on payments law. He received his
undergraduate degree from Princeton and his law degree
from Yale.
.
He has published four books, three edited volumes, two
casebooks, and more than one hundred articles about various aspects of law and
political theory. The Heatstroke Line is his first novel.
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About the Book:
Nothing has been done to prevent climate change, and
the United States
has spun into decline.
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INFORMATION:
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Q: Welcome to The Writer's
Life! Now that your book 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?
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 or did you self-publish?
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 (if any)
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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