Apocalyptic Rhythms: A Conversation Between Lily Brooks-Dalton and Thea Prieto
Ursula K. Le Guin once wrote “Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive,” and back in 2016, when Lily Brooks-Dalton’s post-apocalyptic novel Good Morning, Midnight (Penguin Random House) was released, and when Lily and I discussed early drafts of my post-apocalyptic novella From the Caves, our stories were not supposed to be predictive. In December of 2020, the film adaptation of Good Morning, Midnight—titled The Midnight Sky, starring and directed by George Clooney—premiered to an audience much more terribly acquainted with global disasters and extreme isolation. In August of 2021, the release of From the Caves (Ren Hen Press), which is set in a wildfire-devastated Pacific Northwest, coincided with the one-year anniversary of the 2020 California lightning siege, which forced my family and I, among thousands of others, to evacuate our homes before the largest fires in California history. These events led Lily and I to discuss what it means to write about the end of the world in the midst of cataclysmic change, and the importance of exploring human endurance and hope through fiction writing.
In Good Morning, Midnight, which has been translated into seventeen languages, an aging astronomer refuses to leave his Arctic research center when news of a catastrophic event leads the other scientists to evacuate. Once he is stranded between a world of hostile ice and distant stars, he discovers a mysterious child left behind, forcing them both to endure Earth’s radio silence together. Meanwhile, the Aether spacecraft is on its return flight from Jupiter, and when Mission Control falls inexplicably quiet, the crewmates are forced to wonder, in the infinite void of Space, what endures at the end of civilization.
In From the Caves, which won the Red Hen Novella Award, environmental collapse has driven four people inside the dark throat of a cave: Sky, a child coming of age; Tie, pregnant and grieving; Mark, a young man poised to assume primacy; and Teller, an elder, holder of stories. As the devastating heat of summer grows, so does the rot in Teller’s injured leg and the danger of Tie’s imminent labor, and the future becomes increasingly dependent on the words Sky gleans from the dead, stories pieced together from recycled knowledge, fragmented histories, and half-buried creation myths. In this way, stories are a source of sustenance in From the Caves, and a way for the characters to both grieve and hope at the end of the world.
Today, our society—much like the crew aboard the Aether and the underground survivors in From the Caves—has experienced environmental disasters and a changing world in isolation, unsure of what the future might hold. When Lily and I discussed our books, we were both weathering the pandemic in our respective homes in Los Angeles, California and Portland, Oregon.
Thea Prieto: Perhaps it’s most fitting if we start with the end. In both of our books, there’s never a moment when we or our characters explain exactly how the world ends. There are a few reasons I made this choice, mostly to do with my characters’ limited perspectives, but there were some ethical calls to make as well. I’d be curious to know a few of your reasons for keeping the end of humanity, for the most part, a mystery.
Lily Brooks-Dalton: For me, choosing to side-step the logistics of what happened was part of the original idea. It was an instructional choice: I wanted to tell the reader, that part doesn’t matter. Not in this story. This story is not about the cause, it’s about the effect on these individuals. I wanted it to feel intimate—person-based rather than world-based. When you start talking about the end of the world, that necessarily becomes an expansive discussion about logistics and an entire species. I wanted to maintain a really close gaze on these characters and their singular experience.
Now I’m curious about your own reasons, Thea… especially the ethical ones! I was fascinated by the ways in which your novella uses moments of oral storytelling to give the reader a little more insight into the “before” without fully explaining what happened. We don’t get facts or firsthand experiences, but we do get this mythical representation of what might have occurred. What was your thought process around that?
TP: I believe my thought process was similar to yours, in that I was more interested in exploring individual experiences in the aftermath rather than a specific disaster. One of the original goals for From the Caves was to somehow close the loop between the extreme past and the extreme future of human civilization, which meant all that middle history—what we’re living through now, in the present—would only be known through a very narrow lens. Perhaps this is where ethics come in: any hint of a worldwide disaster is flattened in From the Caves and made archetypal through my characters’ storytelling, so making too much information available felt wrong, in that it would have been an illogical privilege in the writing, as well as reduced that global trauma.
So the mythology in From the Caves does less world building and more in the way of characterization. Sometimes I think of my characters’ oral tradition as nonfictional, in that their stories are collages of real-world belief systems that function more like inkblot tests than backstory. The stories mirror the hopes and fears of my characters, and they mirror my hopes and fears as well. I believe they can mirror the hopes and fears of the reader, too.
LBD: I’m really struck by this idea of closing the loop between extreme past and extreme future in From the Caves—that resonates so deeply with me, both as a narrative shape and also as something that feels deeply plausible. I love the choice you made of allowing the middle ground, the space we inhabit now, to only be viewed through the lens of an oral tradition and through the artefacts left behind, things you or I might pick up at Target tomorrow but might ultimately last for quite a long time… both remnants are such poignant evidence of our fragility, the impermanence of our bodies. But on the flip side—the endurance of the things we make, whether it’s plastic containers or cave drawings.
TP: That question of endurance and impermanence—seems like it was waiting for me early in this writing project. There were times when I found myself putting the pressure on my characters or going deeper into the caves and I would notice this curiosity, or this drive to understand, what is fragile and what is not.
LBD: Were the caves, as a setting but also a connector between the ancients and the future inhabitants, always part of the story? Or did these thematic connections evolve as you worked on the manuscript? It’s so interesting to read these pages now, because I read those opening chapters years ago in a writing workshop at Portland State University! It makes me so curious about what you already knew then about the story, versus how it has matured.
TP: There were certainly discoveries during the writing process, especially in terms of whether the cave was a trap or a home, an ending or a beginning. That early draft I shared in our workshop began with what is now Chapter 4, since at first I planned to confine my characters in the cave for the entirety of the book. That constraint fell away, though, for a few reasons but especially when different parallels between the cave and Tie’s pregnancy developed, and rather than write her into a dead end, I chose to open up more space in the story.
I think the spaces in Good Morning, Midnight do a lot of the same connective work we’re talking about—the landscapes make for extremely dangerous and indifferent antagonists. I think it’s especially underscored during the astronauts’ Space walks and the snowmobile journey, because that’s when the characters have to leave their tiny lifeboats and face enormous, cold realities. And that scale in setting, from the close and constrained to the limitless, lends so much tension to the story.
LBD: Well, I love hearing that. The Arctic Archipelago was something I knew from the start I wanted to write about—there is something so infinite about a landscape like the tundra, both in terms of space (that stretches as far as the eye can see) and in time (a permafrost that never melts) and pairing that with the finitude of whatever has happened to the rest of the world felt like a poignant thing to do. At the same time, the tundra is of course anything but infinite—shrinking year by year, melting faster and faster… in many ways, the most unrealistic thing about this book is the idea that in the near-future the arctic landscape will remain as is. This is something I’ve wrestled with in my new book and have thought a lot about since. But for the sake of Good Morning, Midnight, I wanted to imagine a reality in which that snowy expanse went on forever. The dual setting of space came a little later, and echoes the same work in terms of putting ideas of infinity and finitude alongside each other. I wanted the settings to feel like characters in and of themselves.
TP: I think it’s fitting that the settings would feel like characters, or even inevitable when people are most aware of their dependency on their surroundings. It’s one of the reasons the Enemy Ocean and the Walking Stars crop up as characters in From the Caves—many creation myths across the world characterize elements of nature, which I think shows the close and important interactions those cultures maintained with their environments.
And of course, my characters are given very little territory once summer begins. That finitude you describe can manifest as very physically confined spaces—Arctic outposts, spaceships, caves. I feel like your characters manage to elbow out of their confinements with memories of the past and through human connection, and it allows you to maneuver your characters physically and emotionally to a greater extent within your given story constraints.
LBD: You’re completely right, that sweeping expanse of physical space is almost necessarily accompanied by severe confinement. And that is a spatial reality, but I think it also speaks to a broader truth in storytelling—a story about loneliness must also be about connection. A story about absence must also be about presence, and so on. Even if I think I’m just writing about one half, the other is invoked, so I might as well be aware of how that’s happening.
On a craft level, it was definitely a challenge to bring enough story and enough context into such closed off physical spaces. In terms of emotional maneuvering, I think that was easier. People in enclosed spaces generate interpersonal drama without too much nudging—as the entire world now knows.
TP: Right, if I knew before what I know now about interpersonal relationships in the time of social distancing, I wonder how differently my characters would have acted at the end of the world. And when Good Morning, Midnight was published in 2016, most of your readers hadn’t lived months in isolation like Augustine or the astronauts aboard the Aether. For many readers, a year of isolation was mostly hypothetical, but the pandemic has obviously changed all that.
LBD: I think the pandemic has changed everything, in large and small ways. You know, the term “post-apocalyptic” is sort of a misnomer at its root. The traditional definition of The Apocalypse is that nothing comes after it. It is a complete and definitive end. But definitions shift, and so now we’ve come to accept this new meaning, which includes an after, and which redefines “an” apocalypse (rather than “The” apocalypse) as an event that ends life as we previously knew it. It’s hardly a fictional idea anymore, is it? It’s right now. And that’s terrifying, but also, also… this is maybe the reality that post-apocalyptic fiction has been preparing us for for a very long time. The genre has been inviting us to consider all along: if all of this ended, what might come next? I suppose I hope that Good Morning, Midnight and other stories like it can offer some emotional thread to hang onto in the midst of this seismic cultural shift we’re experiencing. That’s what this time has been about, for me at least—finding threads to hang onto. Stories, phone calls, food, long walks, mutual aid… you know. Whatever works.
I’m sure you’ve thought about this, too, Thea—how has it felt to see parts of the devastating world you imagined in From the Caves leak into reality?
TP: It’s been… horrifying, to say the least, and I find myself reaching out for those emotional threads more than ever these days, perhaps hoping, like my characters, that human connections and floating imaginations and fondest memories hold up better than the corporeal and tangible. Writing From the Caves was one way I began processing my grief, in the wake of deaths in my family and changes to the local and global landscape, but then those August complex fires in 2020… I don’t think a person is ever prepared to see thousands of acres blackened by wildfires, especially when that landscape, with all of its vivid and beautiful life, has for years defined the fabric of home. The LNU Complex Fire got within fifty feet of the house I grew up in—and no closer, thank god—but for months that stark, burnt line out in the fields remained: on one side of the fireline was the growing world I have known my whole life, and on the other side was the dying one I had been grieving in From the Caves. It was almost like this tideline, where a kind of apocalypse or even an Enemy Ocean, had waved up the landscape, swallowed everything familiar, and receded—or at least for now.
LBD: That is wild, Thea, wow. I can only imagine. The image of that line on the earth is so arresting.
TP: Thinking about it now, that line is somewhat like the warning that dystopian narratives so often offer, to maybe help readers avoid the dystopia from coming to fruition. Unfortunately, when it comes to depicting environmental disasters, the narrative assumes readers aren’t beyond the privilege of real-world warnings. So answering that question of what comes next, in post-apocalyptic fiction and elsewhere, I think has grown imperative, and inevitably I keep my hope in humans and their creativity, just as my characters keep their hopes alive in their stories and in each other.
LBD: You raise such an important question, of where we can find hope… as people and as authors. I think in Good Morning, Midnight, that hope was rooted in characters choosing to connect with each other, when they might not have in the past—choosing to do things a little differently. In the book I just finished, the hope was bound up in nature. The rhythm of wild spaces can of course be disastrous for humans, I don’t mean to diminish that at all, but there’s no denying it’s a beautifully efficient system, refined over millennia. There’s a lot we could learn from it.
TP: Definitely, and thinking locally, it was only a few weeks after the fire that the coastal fog turned the entire burn zone near my family’s place fluorescent green with young grass. That fresh green was very heartening, and everyone in the community is still very motivated to reach out to one another in new ways, connecting and learning and preparing for the next fire. So we do what we can within this environmental rhythm we have now, during the time we have on this planet, and work towards bigger and more effective changes.
Lily Brooks-Dalton’s novel, Good Morning, Midnight (Random House, 2016), has been translated into seventeen languages and is the inspiration for the film adaptation, The Midnight Sky. Her memoir, Motorcycles I’ve Loved (Riverhead, 2014), was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. She currently lives in Los Angeles.
Thea Prieto is the author of From the Caves (Red Hen Press, 2021), which won the Red Hen Novella Award. She is a recipient of the Laurels Award Fellowship, and she writes and edits for Poets & Writers and The Gravity of the Thing. Her writing has also appeared in Longreads, The Kenyon Review, New Orleans Review, The Masters Review, and elsewhere.