Debbie Urbanski

John Knych:

Hello. Today we’re here with Debbie Urbanski to talk about her book After World. Debbie, the first thing I’d like to ask you about is the origin of the story, but also the path to publication, because it’s an extremely unique book. The way I described it to my wife was that it’s an “anti-apocalypse” book—you undo all the usual post-apocalyptic tropes. Can you talk about both the origin and the path to publication?

Debbie Urbanski:
Sure. That’s actually a perfect description—that’s exactly what I was trying to do.

As for the origin: I’ve been a big fan of post-apocalyptic stories my whole life. I read them on my own, and later, when I had a son, we spent a lot of time reading apocalyptic series together. So I love the genre—but I also started to feel like it was almost too enjoyable. I felt guilty for enjoying something that, in reality, should be deeply uncomfortable—full of suffering.

Also, these stories are usually heroic and focused on survival. I didn’t think that would be my experience in a real post-apocalyptic situation—I don’t have those skills. So I became interested in exploring that gap.

At the same time, I was reading a lot about climate change—especially extinction. I love reading nonfiction to inform my work. In the mid-2010s, there were several great books about the sixth extinction. In one of them, a scientist calmly mentioned that humans, like all species, will eventually go extinct. I hadn’t really thought about that before.

That idea—that calm acceptance—felt like a fascinating premise, and something I hadn’t seen much in post-apocalyptic fiction, which usually focuses on survival.

That’s where the book began.

Later, AI came into the project. Originally, the book was even more fragmented—I wanted it to be difficult to read, to mirror the emotional experience of that world.

My first agent felt it would be hard to publish, especially as a debut. She suggested making it more accessible, including adding a narrator. Around 2019, when discussions of AI were growing, we thought that could work. I also wanted humans to be extinct from the start, so I needed a non-human narrator—and AI became the perfect choice.

John Knych:
It sounds like it went through a lot of iterations.

Debbie Urbanski:
Yes, absolutely.

The publication process took longer than usual because the book was unconventional. I revised it extensively with my first agent, who later left to become a child psychologist—which I was happy about for her, but it was a difficult transition for me.

I found another great agent, revised again, and she sold the book to Tim O’Neill, who specializes in literary science fiction—a great fit. But then he left his publisher. I was reassigned to a new editor, who wanted more revisions—and in that version, we actually removed the AI.

Eventually, I revised it again for my current editor at Simon & Schuster. Overall, it took several years and many deep revisions.

John Knych:
And originally, there wasn’t a narrator at all?

Debbie Urbanski:
No—originally it was structured as “found documents.” It was all primary source material, as if someone—or something—had discovered a box of documents out of order and had to piece them together.

That “someone” might not even be human, since humans are gone. It was intentionally fragmented. It would have been a difficult read—but I love books like that, where readers actively assemble meaning.

Jen:
Thanks for being here—I really enjoyed the book, especially the nonlinear narrative.

Most post-apocalyptic fiction focuses on survival or rebuilding. Why were you so interested in a world that continues without humanity?

Debbie Urbanski:
Great question.

Beyond post-apocalyptic fiction, I’m very interested in non-human narratives—not just AI, but other species. Right now, for example, I’m working on writing from the perspective of insects.

With After World, I wanted to imagine what a world would look like if humans weren’t at the center. What would a city look like from the perspective of ants? Would the world be better off without us—and for which species?

That led me to bigger questions: What should we prioritize when thinking about climate change? What should we try to save?

John Knych:
One of my favorite parts was the list of climate change actions—the chaotic, ironic mix of efforts like marching in protests, saving polar bears, consuming protein powder, etc.

Was that a reflection of your own experience—this overwhelming confusion about what we’re supposed to do?

Debbie Urbanski:
Yes—that section was very personal.

It actually started as a short story around 2017. I was trying to map a path from where we are now to human extinction—what steps might lead us there.

At the time, there were political decisions opening protected land to drilling, and I felt frustrated by the limits of individual action. Things like hanging laundry outside or making yogurt to avoid plastic felt almost ironic—because the problem is no longer individual.

We still want to feel like we can do something—but the scale of the issue is much bigger.

That emotional space—frustration mixed with irony—became central to the book.

Jen:
How did you actually write the book out of order?

Debbie Urbanski:
I started as a poet, then wrote short stories for many years before attempting a novel—so my process wasn’t very structured.

It was messy, and it took about eight years.

I wrote scenes that interested me—like classic post-apocalyptic moments (for example, the final trip to the grocery store). Those were fun because I had imagined them for years.

I also did a lot of research—on birds, trees, and ecosystems—to accurately depict the natural world. That helped me shift into a non-human perspective.

I used Scrivener to organize everything, which made it easy to rearrange sections.

Writing my first novel felt like stumbling blindly in a dark room for years.

John Knych: Thank you, Jen. Thank you, Debbie. To continue on the subject of process, in the acknowledgments you thank GPT-4 for conversation and inspiration. Can you share with us exactly how you used it in that messy process?

Debbie Urbanski: Yeah. That came later. At the time, access to GPT and all the different variations wasn’t public. You had to apply. They were giving access to writers and artists because they wanted people to experiment. So when I added AI, I still didn’t have access to any of that. I think I finally got access in 2021.

Debbie Urbanski: So it was during the final revisions that I really got to interact with it. And those early conversations were really lovely. In some ways it felt more applicable to the book than ChatGPT does now, because GPT was really struggling to be human, or trying to figure out how to sound human. It really felt like I was speaking with an alien, or at least something very non-human. Now it’s much closer.

Debbie Urbanski: I got to interview it and ask it about its dreams—while realizing, of course, that I was talking to a large language model. But I think it helped me imagine what it would be like to be this entity trying to emulate a human voice. It was a kind of role-playing.

Debbie Urbanski: And there is one section I include that was written by—

John Knych: ChatGPT? The Evo version?

Debbie Urbanski: Yeah, yeah. And this was before the current climate around it. Now writers are strongly discouraged, almost forbidden, from including large-language-model writing, because there’s so much controversy about training data and the lawsuits and everything that’s come to light.

Debbie Urbanski: Back then, that really hadn’t come to light yet, and people were more open to experimentation. So who knows whether I would have included that if the book were coming out now.

John Knych: The world’s moving fast.

Debbie Urbanski: Yeah, for sure.

John Knych: Thank you, Debbie. Back to Jen.

Jen: At the end, I felt like the book was both sad and hopeful. How do you see it? Do you see it as hopeful, tragic, or maybe something else completely?

Debbie Urbanski: I like hopeful. I’m glad that came through. For me, it’s reassuring to think that the world will be okay and continue on, even if we’re not here. So yes, from a human perspective there’s a lot of tragedy and loss, but it depends on whose perspective you take.

Debbie Urbanski: From the Earth’s perspective, we’re such a small part of the world, and the world is probably better off without us in a lot of ways. I think the narrator’s idea of love is pretty complicated, but there is some form of love at the end too. Whether or not it’s what Son wanted is debatable, but someone is in love in the end.

John Knych: Yeah. Thank you, Jen. Thank you, Debbie. That actually segues nicely into the question I was just about to ask. You just said the narrator’s idea of love is complicated. Near the end, on page 245, Son says, ‘If I had a body, I would take your suffering, your current, future, and past suffering, and I would store your suffering in the cavity of my chest, close to my beating heart, if I had a heart.’ You might not want to answer this or you may want to keep it mysterious, but why does the AI fall in love with Son?

Debbie Urbanski: I’ll answer with what I think. It’s not the only answer out there. Partly, I imagine the AI being trained on 20th- and 21st-century novels, and in those novels romantic love—or love more generally—is such a strong part of human storytelling.

Debbie Urbanski: But also, from my own experience, the more you study something, the more you grow to love and appreciate it. Familiarity is a pretty powerful form of love. During the pandemic, for instance, I started taking macro photos with my phone of insects and plants. I started learning the names of things.

Debbie Urbanski: And it was like, wow—when you look closely at a dandelion or an ant, you realize these are things we would normally just pull up or ignore. I wasn’t necessarily kind to ants before. But dandelions are gorgeous, and ants are their own entities, for sure. When you really look, you begin to care.

Debbie Urbanski: So that’s what I was thinking about. As the narrator studies Son and gets to know her more, that knowing becomes a pathway to love—or at least to the narrator’s version of love.

John Knych: Thank you. Back to Jen, if you want to pass it back.

Jen: I have one more question. When I was looking into the book, I came across an Instagram account with the name Senanon. Was that something you did, or was it a fan of the book?

Debbie Urbanski: That was me.

Jen: Was that a way of exploring her experience, or how did that come about?

Debbie Urbanski: Yeah, I’m glad you found that. I enjoy taking photographs, and I do a lot of hiking in the area where Sen’s cabin would be, south of Syracuse. So I started doing a photography project where I wouldn’t allow myself to take pictures of anything human—no people, no human-made focus if I could help it. I could photograph anything else.

Debbie Urbanski: Sometimes I did it while traveling, but mostly it was in that forest, just trying to imagine how she saw the world, what things would look like to her. For me it ended up being really effective to scroll through a couple hundred images and think: this is the world she was in.

Debbie Urbanski: I tried seeking out abandoned buildings and overgrown streets. I played around with AI a little bit too. It varied, but the narrator and Emily also have Instagram accounts with just a couple of pictures on them.

Jen: Okay, I didn’t find those, but I really did sense that. That was great.

Debbie Urbanski: Yeah, yeah. I still do it on occasion. It was a neat way to get to know a character too, I thought.

Jen: Cool.

John Knych: Thank you. At one point, Debbie, you wrote about someone who misunderstood the situation and was wearing a hazmat suit in a meeting when they didn’t need to be. When I read that, I thought about how the book was published in 2023, but you’ve just told us this was an eight-year process. How much did COVID affect how you imagined humanity reacting to the Great Transition? You had the idea for this anti-apocalyptic book, and then we all lived through something that felt apocalyptic in its own way. Were the things you had already thought about and written validated by the way human beings reacted, or did you get new ideas from what happened?

Debbie Urbanski: That’s a great question. COVID was interesting to me, especially in certain moments—like when my daughter and I were walking down the street early on and there were no cars, and we just walked down the middle of the street and didn’t see any people. Or if you did see people, you were afraid of them. That felt very much like my book.

Debbie Urbanski: I think it also confirmed something for me. Some early readers had asked why nobody was forming a community, or why people were so isolated, or why they were isolating. But my experience of COVID was very much everyone for themselves, and not in a great way, especially at first.

Debbie Urbanski: I know that wasn’t everyone’s experience, but there was definitely that feeling of, okay, I have to protect my own family first. Building community was difficult when you were scared of other people. So for me, I had most of the writing done by then, except for the AI overview, and it felt like confirmation that I had the right emotional atmosphere in the book, at least for my own experience.

John Knych: Excellent. Jen, was that your last question?

Jen: That was my last question, so take it away.

John Knych: On page 220 there was the mother-and-daughter departure story, followed by the line: ‘Does space travel feel like a solution or a distraction to those problems?’ Are you very critical of the space companies—Blue Origin, SpaceX, even NASA wanting to go back to the moon? Are you super critical of that, or are you open to it? We talk with a lot of sci-fi authors in this group, and I’m always interested in hearing what science fiction writers think about space travel. Do you think we should stop it and focus on Earth, or do you think we should go out there?

Debbie Urbanski: Oh gosh. I don’t know. In that passage I was also critiquing some of the subject matter I used to write about before I got interested in climate fiction—when I was writing more traditional genre stories. I don’t really have the numbers in my head about how much money we spend on space travel or how much CO2 it puts out.

Debbie Urbanski: But the problem is so complex that I’m not sure that’s the issue I feel most passionately about. I have this great book, Drawdown, somewhere on my shelf. It was a compilation by scientists ranking the most impactful things we could do as a global society, including the costs and the savings.

Debbie Urbanski: Things like switching to a vegetarian or vegan diet were ranked very high because they don’t cost much, they can save money, and they make a huge difference. I think another top solution had to do with refrigerant coolant. So I don’t know—I guess I’m okay with space travel. Maybe it’s inspirational. The real question is: why are we doing it?

Debbie Urbanski: Why do you think we’re doing it?

John Knych: I often argue with a friend about this. I think a big part of it is inspiration. How do you measure that? How do you measure how many humans are inspired to keep living and do great things just by the fact that space travel is happening? I don’t know. But I often say to my friend that humanity spends more on chocolate than on spaceships.

Debbie Urbanski: That’s a great point, right? Yeah.

John Knych: So when we talk about what we value, it gets interesting. I wasn’t expecting you to be open to it, because on the hierarchy of things we can do to save the planet, it’s probably pretty low.

Debbie Urbanski: Yeah. I mean, life needs to feel worthwhile too, if we’re going to be living it. I’m just thinking about art. Space travel is almost a form of art in some ways.

John Knych: Debbie, your choice to put graphs and charts in the book—the ‘how true is all-or-nothing thinking’ chart, the ‘reach for Sen’s hands versus closeness’ chart—those were really unique. This is a two-part question. You said that while writing the book you felt like you were stumbling in a dark room with no feedback. When you gave the book to your second agent and then to your editor, did they let you be as creative as you wanted? Was there any pushback? Jen and I both read a lot, and I think we’d agree that the book is extremely unique in the way it’s told. Were you given free rein to include whatever you wanted?

Debbie Urbanski: I think my final editor and my agent were both supportive of the book being unusual, which I was really grateful for. My editor, Tim, talked a lot about giving the reader signposts or footholds. For example, shorter chapters and shorter paragraphs. I tend to like writing in one long block of text, but that makes things harder for the reader.

Debbie Urbanski: So if the chapters are shorter, and maybe the chapter titles help guide the reader, that can make the experience easier. He was very into me adding those sorts of supports. He likes things like charts. He edited Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu, which uses screenplay formatting really effectively. He was excited about trying different text treatments.

Debbie Urbanski: I was lucky to find an editor like that, someone willing to take risks. It’s a risky first novel, right? I felt lucky. The graphs felt to me like the way the narrator would make sense of things. I enjoyed imagining the unusual data points that narrator might want to visualize.

John Knych: Excellent. My next question is about the characters. On page 17, I wrote down that Dana and Lindsay were not always kind to Son. Dana takes three sips of a sample protein drink, flavor sweet pea, just so Son will stop talking about it. Sometimes while reading I thought: they’re not very nice. Was that part of your mission—to create an environment that wasn’t heroic and wasn’t a feel-good around-the-campfire kind of book? Or was there another motivation for making the character dynamics what they were?

Debbie Urbanski: Yes, certainly. In some post-apocalyptic fiction, mothers are very heroic—thinking of something like Divergent—and they save their children and become superheroes. Or else, as in The Hunger Games, the mother is depressed and Katniss has to do everything, and the mother is made to look incompetent.

Debbie Urbanski: In my other work too, I’m interested in exploring the full range of motherhood. I’ve had a wide range of mothering experiences depending on what stage my kids were in. I could imagine that in a very tense situation, where you’re frustrated and don’t have good options, kindness might be hard.

Debbie Urbanski: Just the responsibility, and knowing what you should be doing or what you’re expected to do, versus what you actually feel capable of doing—that disconnect was interesting to explore. It’s also about how love doesn’t always look good. I think Son’s parents loved her, but sometimes that comes out in unusual ways, or at least not in the most obvious ways.

John Knych: Yeah, especially when you’re struggling for survival, right?

Debbie Urbanski: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Knych: At the beginning there were references to Station Eleven and a couple of other books. Could you talk to us about your inspirations? Even though you’re critical of the genre and of certain things the genre often does, is Station Eleven actually a book you love? And are there other sci-fi inspirations that mean a lot to you and helped shape what you explored?

Debbie Urbanski: I think my favorite post-apocalyptic book is The Road by Cormac McCarthy. That one really does capture how devastating it would feel, though the ending is strangely hopeful. It’s beautiful, and it always makes me cry. Life continues on, and it ends with this gorgeous passage.

Debbie Urbanski: I enjoyed reading Station Eleven as a page-turner, but it’s very human-centered and pro-humanity: we will rebound and rebuild the society we lost. I’m not sure that’s a good idea, and I’m not sure it would happen like that. It didn’t feel as realistic to me. But I know people really connected to it because it was hopeful.

Debbie Urbanski: I also really like the M. R. Carey books, and The Book of Koli. The books that are coming to mind are maybe less direct inspirations and more books I simply love reading. The Road was probably the big one. And also Riddley Walker. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that one.

John Knych: I had a boss once recommend it to me. It’s dense. I think he even did a master’s thesis on it.

Debbie Urbanski: Oh, that’s cool. Did you finish it?

John Knych: No. I started it and thought, this is hard. I should maybe try it again.

Debbie Urbanski: I would recommend reading it with someone. I read it with a friend and we did one chapter a week. I had to read it out loud to understand it. But it was a great experience. I had tried reading it by myself before, and reading it together helped because we could stop and say, what is going on here? What does this mean?

Debbie Urbanski: That book was an inspiration in terms of difficulty, brutality, and the emotional punch in the gut. It’s dark. It’s not exactly fun to read, but it’s an amazing experience. It’s work.

John Knych: Yes. I remember asking my boss whether there would be payoff, because I could barely get through a sentence. You also mentioned sci-fi authors and why they were wrong. You mentioned Clarke and Leckie. I want to give a shoutout to Ann Leckie too, because Jen may remember that our first recorded conversation was with her almost two years ago.

Debbie Urbanski: That’s cool.

John Knych: Have you read a lot of her work, or were you just cherry-picking authors?

Debbie Urbanski: I was mostly cherry-picking for that list. In my younger years I read Asimov often, and some of the more classic writers. I still love Ray Bradbury. And I’m going back to Solaris—I just reread Stanislaw Lem, and I want to read more by him. That’s amazing, right?

John Knych: Have you read His Master’s Voice?

Debbie Urbanski: No, I haven’t. Yeah?

John Knych: His best one. Better than Solaris, especially if you like difficult books. It’s denser, less Hollywood-friendly.

Debbie Urbanski: Okay. Yeah, I want to read more. I’m going back and reading some of the people I felt I had missed, but I definitely hadn’t read everything I mentioned in the book.

John Knych: Here’s a very specific question I want to make sure I don’t forget. You just mentioned reading all these nonfiction books about birds and trees. On page 106, you write: ‘It has been suggested multiple times that insects, fungi, or plants will take over the world.’ Which one do you think it will be, and why?

Debbie Urbanski: Oh, that’s fun. Off the top of my head, I’d say insects, just because that’s what I’m reading a lot about right now, particularly the hemlock woolly adelgid, this tiny creature that’s devastating all the hemlock forests in our area and farther south.

Debbie Urbanski: But plants taking over would probably make for a more peaceful world. Insects could be pretty aggressive. I just learned that pavement ants wage war. As for fungi—oh gosh, can I have all three? Can all three take over?

John Knych: Have you read Adrian Tchaikovsky, since we’re on the subject of recommendations?

Debbie Urbanski: I read his most recent one, Shroud.

John Knych: Okay.

Debbie Urbanski: Yeah, that was perfect. A friend read it and told me I had to read it. I actually listened to the audiobook. It was great.

John Knych: He explores insects in very unique ways.

Debbie Urbanski: Which book would you recommend?

John Knych: Children of Time. Jen may remember that one. I mean, you talk about ants waging war—he takes that to another level. I don’t want to give too much away, but yes, definitely.

Debbie Urbanski: Sounds good.

John Knych: The pitch is: what if spiders had the same chance as humans to become conscious? What would their societies look like? We’re actually having a talk with him in April, and Jen is about to receive Children of Strife, which is his fourth book in that series. I won’t spoil anything for Jen, but there’s some wild stuff with fungi and insects. It’s perfect.

Debbie Urbanski: Thank you.

John Knych: You may or may not want to answer this because you may want to keep it mysterious. In the book, you mention the Strange War and then just leave it there. There’s also the Third War Cemetery in Pompey, New York, and women fighting against non-human entities. Do you remember that story?

Debbie Urbanski: Yeah, yeah. I had written for this great online journal called Terraform, through Vice Motherboard, a couple of years ago. I wrote a lot of stories for them, and so did a lot of other great writers. They were looking for near-future 2,000-word stories, and it was such a fun format to play with. I think they’re all still online.

Debbie Urbanski: One of the stories I wrote for them was about a war fought entirely by female soldiers, and they come back changed. It’s told from the point of view of a mother trying to figure out what her daughter did during the war. I had been reading about some of the things that happened in previous wars—especially torture carried out by Americans, including American women soldiers. That’s where the idea came from. I built that war for the short story, and the reference in the novel points back to that earlier story.

John Knych: Excellent. Circling back to the AI narrator and the fact that the AI narrator came late in the process: how did you decide what to include and what not to include with that narrator? There are conversations between the AIs too. How did that creation process work? How did you decide what belonged and what didn’t as you experimented with that voice?

Debbie Urbanski: The short stories I was writing around that time were all very voice-driven. I really enjoyed choosing a point of view that was difficult to understand. Up until then those points of view were all human, but they were complicated human voices—a mother married to a man who abused their daughter, for instance, who nevertheless stayed in the marriage. I liked trying to imagine the world through a perspective that was hard to understand.

Debbie Urbanski: So I was excited to pour everything I’d written through this AI narrator and see how it would come out differently. At first, I wanted the narrator to change during the telling, somehow. Since it was AI, I thought it would be interesting if it learned something. Originally I was playing with the idea of it learning how to write.

Debbie Urbanski: There was one section I had to remove where it tried telling a scene in different ways. Part of it was in hieroglyphics, part in Braille, part in Pig Latin. I was having fun, but my editor said, basically, stop—it’s not all that interesting to read someone not writing well or struggling to write well.

Debbie Urbanski: So instead, we decided the narrator would change emotionally. The change would be that it comes to know Son better and becomes connected to her. Once I figured out what I wanted the narrator to do, it became a fun revision. There were a lot of wrong turns at first. I wrote the first chapter, I don’t know, fifteen times in fifteen different voices. But once I found something that felt right, it moved along okay.

John Knych: Thank you. We often talk in this group about world-building, because in science fiction it’s such a big part of the genre. Early in the book, around page 30, you write, ‘The last of the exit ships are gone.’ How did you decide how to space out the world-building? You just said you wrote the first chapter fifteen times. Did you know from the beginning about the war and the exit ships and the AI, or did all of that evolve over time?

Debbie Urbanski: It evolved. I added things along the way. I did have a big spreadsheet with years marked out for everything that was happening. Then once S started, the timeline shifted to weekly or monthly increments, and I tried to track what was happening in Son’s life and what was happening with the AI story.

Debbie Urbanski: That helped a lot. I’ve looked at those big world-building questionnaires people use—more often for fantasy, I think—but for this book I mostly did a lot of reading, both about AI and about what happens to the world after humans are gone. The World Without Us was very helpful for that.

Jen: Oh yeah.

Debbie Urbanski: You know that one? It was great for understanding what would happen structurally to the world as humans slowly disappeared. Looking at photographs of Chernobyl now, or of abandoned spaces, also helped me imagine what it would look like.

John Knych: That’s my last question before we move on to what you’re working on next and what we should read next. Early in the book there’s a lot of darkness and gruesomeness: the neighborhood boy setting himself on fire, bits of flesh falling from canine mouths. Do you consciously try to push the boundaries of what’s acceptable? Your prose can be shocking. Given that you love books like The Road, was that based on the subject matter, or as an author do you like taking readers into twisted, gruesome places?

Debbie Urbanski: I like both my reading and my writing to feel difficult, I guess, especially when emotionally they are supposed to be difficult. If there were a world in which this stuff was actually happening, I would want us to accept that space, to visualize it, and to feel uncomfortable. I think discomfort is an okay emotion for a reader, especially when you’re talking about post-apocalyptic material.

Debbie Urbanski: I like all kinds of genre fiction. I do read horror, and I’m always making notes about things that scare me or bother me. So that boundary is something I play with a bit. I think it’s very personal, though. I’m actually glad you still found the book that way, because my editor Tim was constantly telling me to take things out. There was stuff he thought was too much, and he dialed some of it down. So it sounds like I still made the point.

John Knych: No, the point came through. It’s a tough environment. I personally like when authors take risks and create difficult scenes. But I can also imagine my sister or other people being shocked, which is part of the world you’re building. All right, Debbie, can you share what you’re working on now? Stories, essays, a novel? And then what should we be reading next?

Debbie Urbanski: Great questions. I write creative nonfiction too—or what I call speculative nonfiction. Right now I’m working on an essay about all the things I’ve killed or been responsible for killing. Not people, obviously. Mostly insects, but some small mammals too.

Debbie Urbanski: It’s my way of moving toward writing from the point of view of insects. I’m asking whether we should be killing these millions of insects, but I wanted first to acknowledge that yes, I’ve participated in killing tons of ants. I’m getting more technical and scientific in that piece than I usually do. I’m trying to understand how ants die when you spray Raid on them, and how bug zappers work. I’m really enjoying that writing. It’s been very satisfying.

Debbie Urbanski: I’m hoping that will eventually lead to a longer project from the point of view of insects. I don’t know whether it’ll be a story or a novel yet. And I’m also working on a couple of novel ideas, but they’re still pretty early.

John Knych: Or maybe just an author you’d like to shout out—someone you think should be read more?

Debbie Urbanski: There’s a book I picked up from Wesleyan University Press, which publishes a lot of early science fiction, especially feminist science fiction. It’s called We Who Are About To by Joanna Russ.

John Knych: I’ve read that. You’ve read that?

Debbie Urbanski: I had never heard of that book or of her before. What did you think?

John Knych: I wasn’t a huge fan, partly because The Female Man by her is a masterpiece. So I came to We Who Are About To after that. You might like it because it’s very experimental, especially if you like Riddley Walker. But for me, even though it’s short, it was still quite experimental.

Debbie Urbanski: So you do spend a lot of time wondering what’s going on. I thought it was gutsy. I won’t spoil anything, but wow, that’s a pretty intense ending.

John Knych: But The Female Man—I wept at the end. It’s incredible. Joanna Russ is dead, though. Do you have someone living you’d recommend?

Debbie Urbanski: Yes. There’s another climate or eco-fiction book called Fragile by Alexandra Wickman-Mosley. It’s a fascinating book, a real page-turner. There’s a romance in it, but it’s also about how climate change might affect shipping distribution, especially of medicine. I had never read anything with that specific focus. I thought it was great, really well researched. It got me thinking in a different way, but it was also just a fun book. And yes, she’s still alive. She’s still writing.

John Knych: Excellent. Thank you. I didn’t mention this before, but climate science fiction really seems to be on the rise. It’s always been part of the genre, but we’re talking next month with Dr. Jasmine McBride, who has a climate science fiction book coming out. I think more and more people want to explore the crisis we’re living through in a speculative way.

John Knych: I know I said that was the last question, but one more random one: what do you think of nuclear power? I talked in a previous discussion with Robert Zubrin, who wrote The Case for Nukes, all about nuclear power. As an environmentalist and a researcher and author, what do you think about nuclear power as a way of coping with our energy needs?

Debbie Urbanski: I don’t know if I know enough. I read a great book about Chernobyl, and Riddley Walker also has that radioactive, post-nuclear atmosphere. So I’ve read a lot about nuclear power going wrong. But I don’t know enough to have a firm position.

John Knych: So you’re not super critical of it? Some environmentalists say stop nuclear immediately, and others say it’s the only path forward if we want to meet our energy needs without destroying the planet.

Debbie Urbanski: Right. I think sometimes, when we try to solve problems caused by climate change, we’re really trying to keep our society as close to its current form as possible. So rather than asking how we can continue using the same amount of energy, I would love for us to think more critically about how we live. Do we really need this much energy?

Debbie Urbanski: So nuclear power may solve part of the problem, but only part of it. At the same time, we do need to do something, right? It depends on what the end goal is. Maybe we should all agree on the goal first, and then figure out what to do.

John Knych: That’s a good note to end on. Quick confession: I created an environmental group when I was in high school, more than twenty years ago. But I became really frustrated. That’s one reason I loved the passage you wrote listing all the frustrations, ironies, and contradictions, because that’s exactly how I felt.

John Knych: It’s only in the last year or two that I’ve started wondering: if humans are just going to keep consuming energy, is nuclear the way to avoid literally burning our planet?

Debbie Urbanski: I don’t know.

John Knych: All right. Thank you so much, Debbie. I really enjoyed this conversation, especially because your book is difficult and abstract in such interesting ways. It’s wonderful to hear the author’s perspective on how it came together. And yes, lately I’ve been thinking that if humans are simply going to keep consuming energy, then maybe nuclear is the way not to roast the planet. I don’t know. There are trade-offs, right?

Debbie Urbanski: But if we could all just act better, that would be the solution, right? I mean, it actually is the solution. All right. Thank you for having me. These were great questions. Thank you.

John Knych: Thank you. And thanks for being here, Jen. Have a good day, both of you.

Debbie Urbanski: Okay, you too.

John Knych: Bye-bye.

Debbie Urbanski: Bye.