Surprise! It's a new podcast! (And book club!?)

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I’m excited to announce a new project with my friend Ramanan Raghavendran: a new podcast called Futureverse, which is all about climate fiction.

Many of you know this is how I got to covering climate tech in the first place (I wrote about it here and here, in fact). Sci-fi and climate fiction (aka cli-fi) help us imagine solutions and survival as the planet warms. And for our kickoff episode, survival is the topic of the day. We spoke with James Bradley, an essayist, novelist, critic, and the acclaimed author of several climate fiction novels including Clade.

He wrote the book in 2015, and it broadly follows a single family through about 70 years of ever-worsening climate catastrophe. We talked to him in the midst of California’s onslaught of atmospheric rivers, and his 8-year-old book felt like a documentary of now. So we talked about how climate fiction can be catharsis, in that it helps us imagine things continuing, rather than ending (even if it um, isn’t always pretty).

The full audio episode is available on the Futureverse website.

Here’s a sneak peek:

“What I wanna do is to kind of create a sense that once you get a hundred years, or 200 years, or 300 years into the future, the social and economic arrangements that we think of as completely unchangeable in our society are all in flux… While the book doesn't say we need to build giant machines that will suck carbon out of the atmosphere or put umbrellas over the Great Barrier Reef, what it does do is say there is space for change. There is room for change. We can actually alter the world we live in through human agency.”

If you like this episode, please subscribe to receive future episodes! And let’s turn this into a proper book club, shall we? Reply here with your suggestions about who we should talk to next, we’ll let you know what book we choose, and then you, dear listeners, can and hopefully will send us questions for the author in advance!

Enjoy and thanks for listening!

Episode 1: James Bradley