Authors at Home: 5 Questions for Christopher Brown, Author of FAILED STATE
This week’s spotlight is with Texas-based lawyer and science fiction writer Christopher Brown, author of Failed State, the second dystopian legal thriller from the author of the acclaimed Rule of Capture and Tropic of Kansas, in which defense lawyer Donny Kimoe juggles two intertwined cases whose outcomes will determine the course of America’s future — and his own.
- What are you currently reading, watching, listening to?
CB: I’ve been binging on ecologically-themed works across a variety of genres as I spec out my next fiction project. This includes some remarkable recent novels by Latin American women writers that use some of the tropes of horror and the fantastic to tell truths about real life that more conventional modes of realism cannot. Maybe it’s a pandemic thing that I have been taking the time to try to read these books in the original Spanish (with the English translations handy). The Argentine writer Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream (Distancia de rescate) is an intense novella about the effects of agricultural chemicals on children. The Mexican writer Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season (Temporada de huracanas) is maybe even more intense, and stylistically liberated, the story of a Mexican town wracked by extreme weather and violence told in a voice that channels magic. False Calm (Falsa calma) is nonfiction from another Argentine, María Sonia Cristoff, who describes life in contemporary Patagonia using the language of ghost stories. And related to these is a Basque novella, The Dinner Guest (El Comensal) by Gabriela Ybarra, a fictionalized memoir about the author’s investigation of the kidnapping and execution of her politician grandfather by ETA in the 1970s, intertwined with contemporary stories of her mother’s illness and other everyday dramas. That’s where I learned my favorite Spanish word of the year that has no English counterpart: hemerotecas, for special libraries dedicated to providing reading rooms for old newspapers and magazines, the idea of which conjures Borgesian daydreams.
2. Are you still quarantining in your state? What have you been doing other than writing? Have you picked up any new hobbies?
CB: Texas remains on partial lockdown, at least in Austin. People keep trying to go back to normal but quickly realize it is not yet safe to do so — especially what passes for normal in a hard-partying college town. I have stayed super busy on all fronts — not just with work, but also with our 18-month-old daughter, adapting to raising a young child in the weird social isolation of quarantine. I have picked up one new hobby, one I can do after she goes to bed: playing the classical guitar and the German lute, a kind of weird pre-WWI variation on a guitar with drone strings that was associated with the outdoorsy Wandervogel movement. My maternal grandfather was involved in that scene, and that’s how I found myself inheriting a lute not long before the pandemic hit. I have never really played a musical instrument before, not with any seriousness, and have been amazed at how rewarding it is now that I finally have the patience to learn. I took one group class that went from in-person to virtual at the half-way point, but mostly have been teaching myself with Renaissance and Baroque pieces and basic Bach, learning to read music along the way. It’s not that different than reading a novel in another language with a dictionary at your side, but it’s a lot easier to share with others.
3. What’s been the biggest challenge — and most surprising reward — for you during the pandemic?
Our daily lives haven’t changed that much, as my wife and I already worked from home, and had a daily routine that was pretty anchored in our little house by the woods at the edge of town. But the isolation has been a challenge in a way I didn’t expect — our toddler daughter’s isolation from kids her own age, and the challenges of being unable to see family — especially our adult son and daughter-in-law, who live in Asia and who we realistically won’t be able to visit until the quarantines are all a thing of the past. Fortunately we were able to go visit them right before the pandemic.
The most notable reward has been the glimpse into a different way life could be. A world in which the machine slows down. No cars, no shopping, no office face time. You can feel the difference in the air. And when the humans mostly stay inside or keep to small groups, wild animals really are more at liberty to come out in the city. Even as I see a ton more people out enjoying the urban greenbelts during lockdown, learning the art of getting lost in your own neighborhood.
4. As you’ve talked about in many recent interviews, Failed State is rather prescient in a number of ways. As a writer, do you set out to comment on our current situation, or is it more of a coincidence?
CB: I actively evade writing about the right now in my fiction, and even in my nonfiction I mostly deal with everyday political and social issues at an oblique angle. But while my novels are set in an imaginary version of America, I try to build them from the material of the observed world, and use that speculative frame to tell truths about real life that more conventional realist modes cannot — the way a fun house mirror can, through exaggeration and distortion, reveal things you had never noticed about yourself. And while I actively alter reality, I try to tell the truth about what it feels like to be alive in the right now. So if Failed State and its predecessors Rule of Capture and Tropic of Kansas seem prescient, it’s probably because that approach works to draw out emergent trends that maybe haven’t gotten a lot of attention, and to tap into subconscious aspects of how we experience the contemporary Zeitgeist.
5. In addition to your fiction writing, you also publish the newsletter Field Notes! How has the experience of quarantine affected your nature writing?
CB: I started the newsletter in February, right after I finished the final revisions to Failed State and right before the pandemic hit the U.S. It uses material I have been accumulating over more than a decade of explorations in urban nature, but because it follows a weekly journal format it has been strongly impacted by the quarantine. The “nature is healing” vibe came on strong there at the beginning, but now the influence is more in that way the experience of quarantine lets you imagine how else life could be. I think the pandemic helps many of us alter our experience of time, providing vantages into the much deeper temporal continuities our lives are connected to, past, present and future, and everyday observations of plants, animals and ecologies can serve as powerful triggers for that kind of thinking. The newsletter aims to explore that territory by marrying some of the techniques of science fiction with the more grounded practice of nature writing, a combination that I think can produce interesting results. Now I am working on how to achieve a similar effect in fiction — something I did to a certain extent in Failed State and its predecessors, but hope to engage with much more directly, by radically repurposing the “cozy catastrophe” archetype and exploring the nexus between nature, horror, and SF.
Here’s another pic of Elena’s favorite dragonfly:
And here’s an autumn-colored urban coyote:
