A lot of sci-fi writing focused on climate is high literary fiction, which means it’s filled with allusion and often difficult to understand.
So, why don’t authors take on climate fiction as a serialized genre like detective novels, zombie books or erotica?
Is there a way to make climate fiction more playful without making light of climate change as a global issue?
Daniel Backer is the novelist and literature educator behind Off the Wall Novels and the author of Abraham and Lionel Lancet and the Right Vibe.
On this episode of Reversing Climate Change, Daniel joins Ross to explore postmodern and metamodern literature, explaining the postmodern idea that myths guide our decision-making but also make us human.
Daniel helps us make sense of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, discussing how it plays on the detective genre and why we find comfort in the familiarity of literary conventions.
Listen in for Daniel’s take on how literature, at its best, comes from a place of character and learn how a writer might personalize the problem of climate change.
Resources
The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
The Illuminatus Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson
On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense by Friedrich Nietzsche
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
Hamlet 2: The Creative Process
Also on this show
The "Faustian Bargain" in climate rhetoric: Goethe's Faust and modern occultism, with Daniel Backer, October 2024
Grist's intersectional climate fiction contest, with Tory Stephens, February 2021
Jon Raymond's excellent new climate fiction novel, God and Sex, August 2025
Is climate action quixotic? Don Quixote's psychosis and the misuses of political nostalgia, September 2025
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Carbon Removal Newsroom, the news show that ran alongside this one, is over. Its episodes are still up, on the feed Climate Workers Anonymous now uses.
Carbon Removal Memes is still going.
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Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change. Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon, I’m a co-founder of Nori, which is a carbon removal marketplace in Seattle. Today I have with me Daniel Backer, longtime friend and collaborator of mine from my more writing days. He’s a novelist. He’s written books like Abraham and Lionel Lancet and the Right Vibe. You also do a lot of literature education on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram. You can find him on YouTube at Off the Wall Novels, and on TikTok and Instagram as Daniel Backer Author. Hey, Daniel. Actually, I don’t — Daniel — I don’t think I’ve ever called you Daniel my entire life. Hi, Danny.
Daniel Backer: Hi. I transitioned to Daniel and then back to Danny. So, either. What happened is, I was like, Danny maybe is too boyish and you want to go pro. So that was on my mind, but I had a boss named Danny, and he made it perfectly clear that he was the Danny in the room, and so I went by Daniel. And my parents had kind of called me Daniel too growing up, so it wasn’t completely absurd. But then, realizing that was the reason I started going by Daniel, I was like, oh, that is actually pretty silly. I’m just going to be Danny now.
Ross Kenyon: So you had a boss who, like, reassigned your name.
Daniel Backer: Actually, he served as the inspiration for the character Damien in my novel, and I know he will never listen to this podcast episode, so I feel comfortable saying that.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. Damien also just has such context to it as well, as a name. I just assumed someone named that is bad from the start. Should I even think that? I mean, there’s the satanic thing going on from The Omen, is that right? Who’s the guy who wrote Steppenwolf?
Daniel Backer: Hermann Hesse.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. It’s like there’s a — there’s a Demian, I guess. And there’s Father Damien, who worked in Hawaii with leprosy. He was good. That’s a pretty noble thing that counteracts the satanic implications. I think there’s the one you associate with Satanism.
Daniel Backer: That’s a weird opening to the show.
Ross Kenyon: One hundred percent. I’m glad we go right into it, though. We wasted no time. Yeah, my priorities. What’s the point of this show? Danny and I have been talking about how to do this for a long time. We’re both passionate about literature. I’ve learned a lot from Danny. His novels are super fun and play with ideas in really interesting ways. Of course we would be friends. And as much as I like more high literary fiction — and you’re someone I associate very strongly with sort of contemporary fiction, especially like the postmodern fiction of the second half of the twentieth century — I also like genre fiction. Bad books. Bad books where there are innumerable sequels, books that are meant to titillate.
You might know genre fiction from things like detective stories, which are quite popular for this, where there’s a whole industry around writing zombie books, and zombie books where there are, you know, ten, fifteen, twenty books in a row somewhere. Post-apocalyptic fiction, prepper fiction, which plays into fantasies about the end of the world — whether there’s going to be an electromagnetic pulse that disrupts all electrical motors and what that looks like. Obviously erotica is super popular and super prolific, and I imagine quite profitable as well. Danny, missed opportunity there — unless you have a pen name, I don’t know. Romance, mystery. These are, like, quite tropey genres.
And the way that I want to frame this show is that there’s a lot of sci-fi that is high literary fiction. I think things like Parable of the Talents, Parable of the Sower, Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future — perhaps the most, like, high literary version here — you choose The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Some Cormac McCarthy is so impenetrably difficult to read, it’s often closer to something like Melville. I’m like, okay, I need modernist close reading techniques to just make it through this at all. I’m still not getting all the meaning and all the allusion that is happening here. So I try to talk about, how long do I need to wait for there to be climate fiction that is genre, and bad, and serialized in such a way? And is that how you know that climate change is something that people actually care about?
Daniel Backer: Well, I think that if you’re realizing that there’s a dearth of that sort of thing in the marketplace, then the name on that novel would probably be Ross Kenyon. So there’s an opportunity here. There’s a vacuum that you could definitely fill. I think a big issue with a lot of serious literature is that they shook so many conventions of what makes a story work that I find myself sometimes reading more difficult books and being like, why is this seven hundred pages and not two hundred? Because when you have a plot, I think it creates a metric. And plots aren’t for everybody. You don’t have to like a plot, but there’s something nice about a plot where you’re like, oh, okay, it feels done now, or it feels like the middle part, or the beginning.
Like, I think the conventions are very useful, and so I think that’s something that kind of drew me to postmodern fiction — is that they’re very intentionally in dialogue with more traditional narratives. And so even if they’re trying to subvert it, you often do get some sort of an appeal to a traditional plot, even if they are trying to twist it into a pretzel as they’re going. So that has been pretty much the thing that’s got me interested in it, because as literary as the stuff is that I like to read, I like something that does entertain me. You know, I like to indulge in the big ideas and important things about being human, but part of that is entertainment. And [unclear], even if some important people think that we’re, like, finished with the idea of a story as something that’s meaningful to humans. So I don’t know if that answers your question.
Ross Kenyon: But I think you’re blowing some listeners’ minds right now, that the idea of plot might be old hat at this point. But I think in some ways, three-act structure is programmed into our brains for what to expect in a story, to get the feeling fully paid off and validated for investing the time in it. And I mean, I know you’re a big Thomas Pynchon fan, and have you read The Crying of Lot 49? Ahead of this, before that, I’d only ever seen Inherent Vice, which cracked me up. I thought the movie was brilliantly funny, because I started watching it and I was like, what do people mean this movie’s complicated? I don’t get it. It’s sort of a straightforward detective story. He’s going, he’s following leads. And then, like, forty minutes into it, I was like, oh my God, what even — is there a plot? I remember. Did you ever read the Illuminatus! books, the Robert Anton Wilson series?
Daniel Backer: Earlier, but I have not.
Ross Kenyon: Thomas Pynchon is like the same, I feel like. And also, I think they’re both L.A. people, I think, or at least their stuff is often in L.A. But in the Illuminatus! books, it’s like all conspiracies are simultaneously true, even contradictory ones. So you’ll have things where I’m like, I thought this wasn’t — all of these things coexist at the same time, and it’s not really about the plot. It’s almost just about being in that place and the hilarity of story, and do stories matter? I don’t think I’m smart enough to understand what is trying to be said by that. Pynchon’s like this too, right? What do you need to say this?
Daniel Backer: So I think the criticism of a lot of this experimental stuff is true in a lot of cases — that it can be just navel-gazing, it can just be an author trying to show off how experimental and stranger they can be. But I think the standouts of postmodern fiction and experimental fiction do a great job of subverting stories and ideas in a way that feels very meaningful to people’s lives. And so, for example, like, I’m rereading V. by Thomas Pynchon right now, and one of the main themes in it is that myths are the things that guide people’s decision-making, especially people in power — that they will commonly evoke a myth in order to justify certain actions, certain atrocities.
And specifically, like, a tenet of fascism is evoking a mythic past. So that’s, like, pretty important, putting that in there. But then this kind of goes without saying, but these are myths. These are not true, they’re not historical documents. They’re stories that people tell. The unreliable narrator is a popular thing in many different literary forms, but especially in postmodern fiction, when they’re trying to engage history and storytelling and myths, they blur all of those things together, so that they’re saying that, like, when we talk about the past, we’re telling a story and we’re telling a myth. But it’s more complicated than just that, because they’re also saying that this is what makes us human.
And so one of the main themes of V. is that myths are made up and they justify atrocities, but to get rid of them makes us as inanimate as the material objects in the room around you. And so his thesis at the end of this is kind of like, keep cool but care — that you in some sense sort of have to detach yourself from the historical train tracks that you’re on, because they are fraudulent, but at the same time you do need some utilitarian myths just to have a soul and to have emotions and have relationships with other people.
Ross Kenyon: Which — people have an association with postmodernism at this point. Depending on your political background, you might have associated it with criticism from people like Jordan Peterson, who are saying postmodernism is just about the death of truth, and that there’s sort of at least a cultural dead end of nihilism and despair. And what you’ve just said struck me as none of those things. Where do you think that gets twisted along the way? Or, I mean, yeah, we can start there.
Daniel Backer: I think, truth be told, the criticisms that people like Jordan Peterson have, I think are valid-ish, but I don’t think he gives a very charitable interpretation of it, because postmodernism is a lot of different things, and not a lot of postmodern thinkers necessarily agree with each other on everything. And so it’s almost like when you hear someone criticize something without demonstrating their familiarity with it, you’re kind of like, ah, you may be right, but that’s actually ours to criticize, because it’s important to us. But I mean, postmodernism can refer to an era, to a sensibility, to an aesthetic. Sort of the cop-out that I give myself sometimes is that I really try to ground the conversation in art.
Because I noticed that when people are not familiar with postmodernism, the first thing they try to do is turn it on itself — that they’re already going meta before they’ve even kind of mastered the fundamentals, which is just a method of questioning. It’s questioning some fundamental assumptions, asking the question, what about the way we’re asking the question is determining the sort of answers that are coming up, you know? And I think maybe the super charitable interpretation of postmodernism is that it’s not supposed to be a comprehensive worldview. It’s a tool in your toolbox.
So, and like, a classic example is, what about the way that we divide men and women influences the answers that we come to when we ask questions about what is a man, what is a woman? And it doesn’t necessarily come up with conclusions, but it’s just asking you to say, hey, let’s take a look at our categories for a second. What about the way that we’ve created these categories might influence the conclusions that we reach?
Ross Kenyon: Interesting. And if you take for granted the stuff you said about myth as pretty core to postmodernism, you might say the idea of what makes a man, what makes a woman are myths that different cultures have, stories that they tell ourselves, that these are not just inherently fixed, immutable characteristics. In fact, there’s a lot of culture that’s tied up in here, and that how we engage with those myths changes the answers that we might receive from them.
Daniel Backer: Exactly, yeah. So I think, following that thread, like, one of the classic ones is that men are traditionally associated with dominance and women are traditionally associated with submission, and so they’re basically just asking, like, how do we drag that into conversations where it doesn’t belong? And so, like, I get people’s frustration with it, because if you are used to just kind of tracking a traditional logical thread, and you hear that, like, oh, Derrida said logic is not necessarily always great — like, I get why Jordan Peterson freaks out about that, because he’s built his life and career on this notion of objectivity, which I’m, you know, highly critical of on my TikTok in particular, because I think often people will use the word objective just as a rhetorical strategy.
And even though I think we can come to some objective observations about the world, I like to use the word objective-ish, is that at the end of the day we’re always going to be observing the world through the holes in our face and experiencing things in a mitigated way. And so, like, even though I understand why people think it’s very nihilistic, I don’t think they’ve always actually even read the thinkers that are associated with these ideas. And so, almost talking out of two sides of my mouth, people who are familiar with postmodernism sometimes get frustrated that it doesn’t have enough conclusive information within it. But again, that’s kind of why I like to put it mostly within an artistic framework, because most people don’t read fiction and be like, wait a minute, did this really happen?
Like, there’s a suspension of disbelief, and I think that’s where postmodernism is most interesting. But I find arguing about postmodernism is a total dead end, and trying to make a postmodern criticism of postmodernism is a total waste of time, even if it’s kind of fun, you know.
Ross Kenyon: You don’t really — why did we do this podcast, then, man? Because I’ve got more time to fill.
Daniel Backer: Well, I mean, that’s the thing. I guess it’s not a waste of time, but I just find that, usually, again, the criticism that postmodernism undoes itself is usually made by people, like, as they’re learning about it, is that they’re like, it questions fundamental assumptions, but what about the fundamental assumptions of postmodernism? It’s like, well, yeah, but one of their tenets is that they think that discourse is something where you organize the parameters. And so, like, they’re organizing the parameters just for utilitarian sake. They’re like, well, let’s, like, maybe not undo the discourse before we know what it is.
But I think there’s also a reason that postmodernism as an era is considered kind of over in a lot of ways, and, like, metamodernism is, I think, more in vogue in critical circles, because it sort of takes the critical incredulity of postmodernism, but then is also like, okay, but we need a truth, we need objects. And so, like, within that realm there’s speculative realism and object-oriented ontology, and they kind of take the best of both worlds — is that they’re like, we have objects, both material objects that are, like, in the room with us, but also philosophical objects of conception, like within your mind. And even though they’re, like, real-ish, there’s a part of them that’s always a little bit removed from us, so we can’t know them completely, but we can sort of build games with them in a way that works for us.
Ross Kenyon: I’m going to share with you something that I’ve used to anchor my thinking for a long time. This insight was one of the main reasons that I figured out that philosophy grad school was not the right fit for me, and I’ve always associated it with postmodernism, but it sounds closer to metamodernism, frankly. Where I read Nietzsche’s On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense — have you ever read that?
Daniel Backer: Well, I thought — I’d love to hear it. It’s a classic. People consider it one of the, like, proto-texts of postmodernism.
Ross Kenyon: Where he talks about how every category, every concept is a lie. Everything is truly unique, yet we are forced by how diverse and numerous the objects in the world are to make sense of them by grouping them. And every grouping is inherently unjust, because everything is truly unique. Yet if you fail to group them in any meaningful way, you lose your mind, because you cannot categorize, and anyway it’s just undifferentiated mass, and you will drown, your mind will drown. And in some ways that has made me kind of like a more boring King of the Hill, Hank Hill kind of figure in my life. As we discussed, I’m kind of conventional in my life, where I used to be a little bit more radical and interesting and taking the road less traveled.
And in some ways this postmodern, or even metamodern, insight has caused me to respect tradition a little bit more, saying, okay, this is the product of thousands or hundreds of years of evolutionary insight for what makes a stable-ish life that is worth living. I’m more willing to trust a given tradition than the postmodern tendency to philosophize with a hammer, to use another Nietzschean phrase that postmodernism gets called. It’s made me, like, more dispositionally, personally conservative, wanting a more stable, less artsy, anything-goes kind of life. Is that metamodernism?
Daniel Backer: That is a fascinating question. The short answer is, I don’t know. But I do know that, you know, critics of postmodernism, I think, sometimes do gain [unclear] — people notice it, like Jordan Peterson and David Foster Wallace, both, who criticize postmodernism, albeit in completely different ways, very different ways, but yeah.
And, like, I definitely like David Foster Wallace’s criticism of it more, because all of his work is postmodern, like, as much as he was trying to advance it, I think categorically it’s postmodernism. I wouldn’t die on that hill, I could hear an argument that it was otherwise. But both David Foster Wallace and Jordan Peterson — Jordan Peterson more so — get accused of being conservative, and of course the cop-out for Jordan Peterson is, no, I’m a classical liberal, it’s just everything I say is conservative. But, a little bit more of a digression. That being said, I find that Buddhism and texts in Buddhist philosophy tend to access some of what I consider valuable about postmodernism, but in a more accessible and experiential way.
And so sometimes the concept of dharma is interpreted as attachment to certain truths. And so it’s not necessarily that we’re playing the game of what is true and what is false, but it’s, like, what notions of solidity are you projecting onto the narratives that you have, and in what ways are you identifying with truths instead of just evaluating if they’re true or false? Because one of the biggest criticisms that I have against this notion of objectivity is that it’s just a lie — is that people are like, I’m being objective, and my emotions and my desires are not influencing the data that I’m processing.
And then again, just to shit on Jordan Peterson one more time, is that, like, the venom which he has begun to kind of enact in the second part of his career, I think, demonstrates more of an attachment to certain ideas that he has than any kind of, you know, disinterested just stating the facts. So yeah, all of that is to say that, like, I think that, you know, people do need stability, and maybe where conservatism goes wrong is saying that everyone should have the same exact kind of solidity that I have, or the same kind of stability that I have as an individual.
I don’t think those are necessarily bad things to want, but when we attach ourselves to those truths and say this is the divine truth or the objective truth, that’s where I’m kind of like, this just sounds like we’re using our desires and opinions to rationalize the data that we’re processing.
Ross Kenyon: Hmm. What do you make of the presence of red herrings in Pynchon that almost feel laid to mislead? Like, there will be people named silly things. What was the example that most cracked me up? There’s a couple. Was it [unclear]? Oh, yeah, Genghis Cohen is, like, a very, very funny combination. There’s, like, a bunch of things like that. Where — is it meant to say something? Is it because those words are claimed by cultures, right? They have meanings that precede your reading of the book, and it’s meant to play with that. But I can’t tell if it’s playing with it in a meaningful way, or if it’s just meaningless wordplay. And is that postmodernism? See, that’s the kind of question you end up asking, and then you become the guy who says, I don’t like modern art, I find modern art to be distasteful. And that’s not really that fun of a place to be in, but I also don’t know what it’s doing.
Daniel Backer: Yeah, that’s the thing. For any one of Pynchon’s names that he uses, I think it is a coin toss, that, like, this one could mean something, this could just be a silly joke of his, because he is a very whimsical writer and is characterized as being very difficult, and people don’t, I think, push through that difficulty to realize how cartoonish and absurd it is. So yeah, I mean, for any one name it’s very difficult to tell. But the more I have read Pynchon in particular, but also just other postmodern stuff, there often is a thread that isn’t always easily grasped on the first read-through, and that’s a huge barrier to entry, I completely understand.
But when I first read this kind of stuff, I would finish these books and just be like, it was cool, there were memorable moments, I have no idea what it is. But the more that I have read them — The Crying of Lot 49, for example, I think has a very clear thesis. That doesn’t mean that every phenomenon in the book is easy to place within that thesis, but yeah, on subsequent readings, I think that there is definitely an argument that he’s trying to make. But again, that argument is criticizing a traditional way of constructing truth, and so the yield of this thesis, or the big takeaway from the book, is kind of slippery and not always easy to pin down, but it’s there, you know.
Ross Kenyon: Your videos on the book are really good and taught me a lot, and also made me appreciate the book a lot more, because I watched — for me, I enjoy humor. There’s plenty in the book to laugh about, where you’re like, this is absurd, sir. Does it even make sense? This world that is being constructed in front of me is just hot nonsense, and it has a realistic comedy to it. It’s the same thing I mentioned with Inherent Vice, where you’re like, does this mean anything? Is it signal, is it noise, who even cares? The ride is fun. And in the same way, too, capers are often like that. Did you watch — sorry, I have so many thoughts racing through my head. Did you watch the Paramount+ show about the making of The Godfather, The Offer?
Daniel Backer: No. My dad was just telling me about this. I know that it exists, but I haven’t seen it.
Ross Kenyon: If you like the Golden Age of Hollywood and Bob Evans and that whole shtick, it’s good. But Bob Evans is trying to get Chinatown produced near the second half of the show, and Chinatown I’ve seen a bunch of times, I have no idea how it works. I’m like, so there, you slept with the twin, and then who the money goes to, who’s getting paid off here? And in The Offer, they actually don’t know what Chinatown is about, and no one can really explain it, and it’s sort of a running gag. I picked up on it and it made me feel less dumb for never really understanding Chinatown. And whenever I read, or like Brick, the Joseph Gordon-Levitt [unclear] of high school — today I’m like, what? Even Big Lebowski, I’m like, what, he threw out a ringer for a ringer, and there’s a toe, and, like, who got paid, and what do the Germans even think they’re doing? And the thing is, none of it matters, because it’s all world-building.
Just being in this place, and it’s like a set of feelings, and that’s all that I’m left with, which is maybe a superficial read, but I had that really strongly here. Teach me more about what is actually happening in this book, and maybe introduce it for people listening.
Daniel Backer: I mean, yeah, noir is a perfect touchstone for this, because it achieves a lot of what postmodern work does, but obviously in a simpler, more straightforward way. But you’re exactly right — like, if you watch Chinatown or The Big Lebowski, I think part of the intentional effect of those movies is to disorient you. I’ve seen The Big Lebowski probably fifteen times and I could not accurately tell you what the problem is.
Ross Kenyon: Thank God. This is such a relief. I thought this was just me. Everyone else is watching this, loving this movie for decades, and did none of them get it either? Sounds like.
Daniel Backer: Yeah. I think The Big Lebowski is a perfect touchstone for it too, because the Dude, for all of his admirable qualities, without being too judgmental, is dumb. Like, he is not a bright guy, and he does not solve the plot like a Sherlock Holmes type who’s, you know, relying on his just unique sharp intuition. The Big Lebowski advances the plot kind of in spite of the main character. I think that that is, you know, what’s kind of fun about that. But then what’s cool is that, you know, Pynchon was a big fan of dime novels and genre fiction, and detective and spy fiction in particular. And so I think that’s what gives his books so much fun, at least from my perspective, is that they’re kind of like a romp and a play on this traditional genre.
And so with The Crying of Lot 49, you have a housewife who is substituted for the smooth-talking detective who relies on his intuition and wit. And I think that at the beginning of the book there’s, like, a very clear thesis statement about that Oedipa Maas as a character allows her to access the deeper truths that a detective would traditionally suss out with a more conventional way of assessing the truth, and that it’s the fact that she’s able to empathize with other people and see their pain. And he beautifully puts this into an image with her tears. And that’s one of the reasons it’s called The Crying of Lot 49, is that she has a lens of tears that are always filling her eyes that seemingly distort the information that’s going through them, and she relies on this instead of a logical thread tracking suspects, this, that or the other.
Ross Kenyon: And if I remember correctly, The Crying of Lot 49 ends on a very ambiguous note. You get to, like, the crying of lot 49, but you don’t actually get to see the scene of them at the auction of whatever lot 49 is supposed to be. I think it’s ambiguous.
Daniel Backer: Yeah, yeah. And one of the comments that I make in the video is that her last character action is that she has to sit back and await the crying of lot 49 in her own story. And I think — I could be reading too deep into this, but I think that this is a comment on her marginalization in a male-dominated world. And I think that it’s kind of a bittersweet ending, is that she gets to be our protagonist and she gets to in some ways unravel this big conspiracy, but then at the end, in her own story, she kind of has to sit back and watch the men sell property in front of her and suss out this inheritance that was really supposed to be for her. And I mean, we can explode this conversation into different notions of the Oedipus complex and ways that that’s instantiated in symbols within society. But I think that more than anything, it is a play on the detective genre and a critique of scientific rationalism and traditional ways of constructing meaning.
Ross Kenyon: Beautiful thoughts. It’s also possible — well, I mean, the Oedipus complex both in pop culture and also in literary criticism is extremely old now, thousands of years old, and so just naming someone Oedipa already could be a red herring, or, like, a misleading thing, because there’s so much meaning already tied up in it.
Daniel Backer: That’s the most frustrating part of reading Pynchon, is that, like, especially with a short book like that, you’re like, oh, I’m going to breeze through this in an afternoon. And then, like, in the first line her name is Oedipa Maas, and you’re like, okay, I’ve got to hit Wikipedia for a second. Like, I’ve got to unpack this already. And, like, a single paragraph will send you on a little journey like that.
Ross Kenyon: I wish there was more play with genre in climate fiction, because to date it hasn’t been the same kind of playfulness that I long to see. Like, for instance, one of my favorite SNL sketches ever — and I’ve never been able to find it, because NBC is so stingy about what they allow to be put onto YouTube — but there’s a Kelsey Grammer sketch when he was hosting, and he was a detective, and it’s one of those, like, you knock on the door and everything they say is some sort of metaphor. But the only metaphorical allusions that he has are burrito-related. To be like, she walked into my office like a warm burrito on a cold Chicago night. And it’s like, everything, every single thing that he has is burrito-related. I want to bet it’s one of the sketches that barely made the show. You could tell it was, like, the last ten minutes and Lorne Michaels is like, whatever, the burritos, that’s just fine, I guess.
I wish there were climate books that approached this level of mainstream acceptability, because people read a lot of this stuff too. I’ve even seen the effects on loneliness of people rewatching sitcoms. There’s something inherently comforting about rewatching The Office for the billionth time. And there’s also a literary version of this too, with genres. Like, one of my friend’s older sisters, I see her on Goodreads sometimes, and it seems like she reads, like, five hundred mysteries a year. I can’t keep up with how many mystery novels this woman reads. How much detection can one person stand in a lifetime? I’m not sure. She might be over her allotment. But there is something that’s, like, having the tropes that are regularized, that you’re just re-experiencing, that is, like, really — it feels like home in a way. And high fiction does not feel like that.
So we’ve invoked David Foster Wallace, he’s been referenced. I’ve been reading Infinite Jest for, like, six months at this point, and psyching myself up to read it. I have a good time every time, except for thoughts of all the terrible stuff he did to Mary Karr. You put that aside and try to appreciate this landmark novel. It’s work. It’s not really fun in the same way that I want to experience the familiarity of literary conventions that make me feel at home. I’m being challenged, I’m being toyed with and being subverted. I want to be subverted in my free time. There’s a line, I think, on Parks and Rec where one of the characters is like, sorry, Charlie Kaufman, people have work in the morning. I butchered the quote, but it’s something like that.
Daniel Backer: That, like, yeah, I think it can be exhausting, a lot of the hyper-experimentation and whatnot. But I think for climate fiction, maybe it could seem like it’s making light of a pretty serious issue that we haven’t had closure on yet. And so, like, I can kind of see that there might be some resistance to maybe parroting or satirizing the genre. But at the same time I would love to see that, especially someone who’s, like, not as familiar with climate fiction. Like, the postmodern climate novel, I think, is a super interesting notion. And on that note too, I know that, like, William Vollmann, I think, has written a lot of nonfiction on climate and then also a lot of postmodern fiction. So maybe if there’s somebody to do it, it would probably be him.
Ross Kenyon: You’ve read at least [unclear]?
Daniel Backer: Yeah, I think I’ve read at least one of his, maybe two even.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, wouldn’t it be something that’s nearly so highbrow? Or if it would be postmodern, it would be so in a way that would be playing with convention, so that there’s an awareness that they’re playing with an established genre and they’re poking fun at it while also affirming it. Something that’s metamodern is what I’m trying to say. I’m talking about genre fiction. Some of these books are, like — if you take apocalypse fiction, these are guilty pleasures of mine, some of which are terrible. Truly, some of them have politics that will make you want to barf and you’ll have to rage quit, but some of them are often quite good. But they’re often pretty tropey. Like, you know broadly what kind of character you’re going to get. In fact, most of these apocalyptic books — just tell me, like, when you imagine, who’s the protagonist in apocalyptic fiction? Who is this person?
Daniel Backer: I guess kind of like a rugged — I’m picturing a lot of torn [unclear]. Is that right? Like, kind of maybe a rugged person who has, like, visible scars, maybe like a sling of bullets across their chest.
Ross Kenyon: Pretty close. Yeah, I would say they’re always, like, recently former special forces or something like that, so they have, like, absolutely superpowers relative to the, like, set of skills. Yeah, yeah, I can sneak around in the forest, no one would see me, kind of deal. Slit a man’s throat. Yeah. There’s, like, always — there’s just a lot of stuff like that that’s pretty goofy. So you know what you’re getting. But current climate fiction hasn’t had that, as far as I know. If you’re listening still at this point and you like literature, is there something out there that is about regular people trying to survive in a climate-changed world, that is not, I don’t know, The Ministry for the Future — it’s a really interesting book on this, but is also not heavily serialized, the kind of books that people consume one after the other, page-turner kind of deal? That’s what I’m looking for, as I’m always looking for something less serious. Unless [unclear] — is what you describe too upsetting?
Daniel Backer: Yeah, I mean, I would assume it’s a newer genre to write, so I think there’s definitely still time.
Ross Kenyon: And if it hasn’t been clear, I’m obviously pressuring you to fill this void by writing this book that you would like to see in the world.
Daniel Backer: I’m too goofy. I would write the version that was, like, too self-aware. Like, one of the scripts we were working on back in the day was, like, the most, like, intentionally fourth-wall-breaking, just, like, satire of rom-coms.
Ross Kenyon: And you’re like that — or maybe you told me about it. I’ve read one of your scripts that I feel like felt very aware.
Daniel Backer: Yeah. And, like, there’s pluses to that too. It’s kind of a commentary on how, like, at this point in humanity’s life, everything is a reference to something else, and there isn’t a whole lot of unmediated experience. Like, everything has a link to some book, movie or TV show that you can reference.
Ross Kenyon: Your life is just — if you read old books in the pre-modern or even just early modern era, there’s not a lot of, like, oh, have you read this book? Have you seen the latest season of Six Feet Under? You know, like, there’s not a lot. But I feel like, maybe read a book about contemporary humans — it’s like ninety percent of what we even talk about.
Daniel Backer: Yeah, it’s complicated. I think that’s one of the issues for fiction writers today, and there’s a lot of discourse about this on the internet, of, like, are you being unrealistic for not including social media in your fiction, or tacky if you do? Because I don’t do it, not as, like, a rule, but, like, I can’t see myself writing down the word TikTok in a story that I write and pulling it off in any kind of way that I would want to read a story like that. And so I do have to kind of contrive these stories to be, like, a little bit less realistic than they are, because I just don’t want to read a book about somebody on their phone. I’m sure someone’s done a good job at that.
Ross Kenyon: I’ve seen it. They’ve gotten better at trying it in visual media recently, where they, like, pop up on the screen, the sound will, in this, like, little bubble.
Daniel Backer: Even that, though, it seems smarmy. They’re like, oh, look at us, like, truly it is the modern era, you know? Like, I don’t know, maybe that’s just me. But, like, maybe the first time I saw it — because I know on House of Cards they would do that a lot. Or they’re, like, really the first time that it was, like, really big.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think you’re right. Yeah, that’s the first time I remember seeing it anyway. And, like, I remember kind of being like, cool, but also kind of like, no thank you at the same time. It definitely felt novel.
Yeah, I like the old-school way of watching, like, Tony Soprano have to drive to a payphone to found a deal. Yes. But why do I think that, though? Because my life is not like that. Is it just because I’ve been trained through the way that we experience media that real stuff happens viva voce? Like, we’re like, what — why do I think that? Why can’t real life happen in the digital age?
Daniel Backer: I think this might be connecting us, counter to what we were talking about earlier, just about, like, the kind of loss of utility of stories, is that, you know, I think this is kind of a cliché criticism now, but with how much technology and social media we have, we’re not as active. And the traditional idea of, like, you know, the hero’s journey — you go on, you have to fight the monster, not just to kill the monster, but to kind of learn something about yourself and to uncover some sort of truth that’s, like, in the boon that you bring back to the community. And I think in a very real way, the boon is just a few keystrokes away, like any question that you might have.
And then too, I think there’s just, like, a growing distaste for that entire process of, like, having to go on a journey to find something out. I think even beyond just, like, laziness, I think that we’ve sort of, like, criticized that cycle to death more than anything. The problems that plague us, people consider very [unclear]. Even hard right-wingers are ideating, like, citing major institutions to be the source of their problems. They obviously have a totally different angle than the more left perspective, but I think that there is this sense that we, like, we already figured it out. It’s just a matter of these problems being too big for us to surmount. I’m kind of spitballing too. That’s what comes to my mind.
Ross Kenyon: You think we no longer as a civilization or culture believe that individual progress is meaningful? That’s your take?
Daniel Backer: I think so, you know. And, like, it’s something I struggle with for myself and just in conversations with different friends, is that it seems like the more aware you are of the problems that plague society, the less confident you are that anything can be done about them. And so maybe this relates to the climate fiction thing too — is that, and you obviously know much more about this than I, but, like, I think a lot of people are super depressed about it. There’s climate anxiety. It’s, I think, maybe a little harder to tease out a light-hearted narrative when they’re like, oh, you’re ruining the world, and the people responsible are in control of these enormous industries.
Or maybe it’s not even the people responsible, it’s the industries themselves. It’s a runaway machine that was started by people that are long dead. And so my gut tells me I don’t want that to be the end of the conversation, but I think that does explain a lot of the paralysis and, like, unwillingness for people to engage in individual pursuits.
Ross Kenyon: Well, there’s a big story that happened a couple of years ago, and I can’t speak with certainty on exactly how it played out, but the idea that the carbon footprint was a corporate invention to take scrutiny off of corporations, and to get people to think about their own liability climate-wise, and to have them stop criticizing oil and gas. And I’m pretty sure that has been pretty well validated at this point, but I can’t say with certainty that it is. And so it could be the case that maybe we do believe that actually what you do as an individual doesn’t really matter. Like, sure, you can sort your recycling better, you can fly less, but, like, if the Earth is going to collapse anyways, like, why even bother?
Daniel Backer: I think you’re right. I don’t know that we could say it’s a fully explanatory solution that you’re posing, but it’s in the cultural mix for sure. Yeah. Well, what it makes me think of too — and I’ve made a lot of TikToks about this — is that I think people have a tendency to jump to the most massive scope in any conversation. And so, like, I like to make TikToks about the importance of community, that just, like, as an individual, it’s important to find a community that you love and that loves you super hard. Might take your whole life, but that’s, like, a worthy pursuit. And people immediately will say, well, I mean, until capitalism’s over, it’s not really possible.
It’s like, well, you’re not wrong. Like, capitalism does make it very difficult to form communities, and especially, like, if you’re fighting for your life, paying rent and buying food. But at the same time, I notice that we take a small individual problem and immediately blow it up to the most massive way to think about it — is that the only way to approach this conversation is on a massive scale with huge statistics and analyzing major institutions. And this makes sense, because you want to be accurate. But I characterize this in Lionel Lancet and the Right Vibe, my second novel, as, like, taking a bird’s-eye view of everything that people think what truth is, is to sort of, like, remove the individual and only look at everything in a huge context.
And there are different applications of this, that it’s like, oh, if you’re an artist, you explain that story to yourself in terms of fame — that if you even say you don’t want to be famous, it almost sounds like you’re creating a self-defense story, or so you’re, you know, defending yourself by not actually going for it and just saying, I don’t actually want that. Where it’s like, you can very validly not want to be famous and still enjoy your artistic career. And I just think there’s countless examples of it, is that people’s scope is often too big, and then they justify doing — I think because, like, oh, the only way to do something is to do it at scale. Which is funny, because you can’t ever achieve scale if you don’t start with what’s right in front of you.
And the funniest part of this critique is that it almost sounds like Jordan Peterson saying you have to clean your room first before you try to change society. So, like, I want to call that out, that that’s not what I’m saying, but I think people go to big picture too soon.
Ross Kenyon: Is not literature inherently personalizing? You have to write about characters that people care enough to stick with for several hours, and this is small. Literature is almost inherently small. And stories that don’t do this I often associate with things like science fiction, which often come from a place where they have a theme or world they want to create and explore — what if we all lived on Mars? And it was an anarchist Mars, by the way — rather than someone coming out at the other end of the telescope and saying, like, oh, I have an idea for a character, it’s like a mixture of some of the traits of my [unclear], like, what would they do under these circumstances? I have such a strong vision of who this person is and what it’s like for them to be in the world. Those are two entirely different ways of being an author, and there are probably several more additionally. But do you agree that literature just has a personal touch, right, at its best? It should come from a place of character?
Daniel Backer: I think so, yeah. You could probably show me an example of something that doesn’t do that, and it’s very funny, of books that are like exploring worlds too. It doesn’t always, but the literature that I love the most, it’s because it comes from a place of character. I think the first book that I had this with was Anna Karenina, I told you about, where [unclear] — like, I feel so strongly toward Anna and Count Vronsky and then Karenin, all these people. My God, I feel like I’m all of these people simultaneously. And that to me was a sublime achievement that has been very rarely matched.
Yeah. Seth Rogen, of all people, has an interesting insight on this, is that, like, amateur writers will often make a blank main character because they want everyone to relate to it, and so name it, like, John Everyman. And the funny thing is that, like, I mean obviously, you know, unless you’re a very talented writer, it’s probably not going to be very good. But he said that one of the things that he discovered was, the more particular you make the character, the more universal it feels, because you need to have an individual in order to, like, project yourself onto, or to, like, evoke those universal qualities.
And so sometimes, like, as a writer, you’re almost doing the audience’s work for them by trying to make it super universal, when really your job should be to make it particular. Choose your world, choose your details, don’t make it so abstract, and then the reader will bring that to the table. They will see themselves and they will see the whole universe within those particularities that you chose.
Ross Kenyon: So insofar as we’re trying to figure out how to write climate genre fiction, low fiction here — did you ever play that game This War of Mine?
Daniel Backer: No, never heard of it, actually.
Ross Kenyon: I don’t know to what degree you’re a gamer, but it’s really amazing storytelling. It’s based on the Siege of Sarajevo, and you’re not — it’s the only war game I’ve ever played where you weren’t actually a soldier trying to kill as many people. It’s just surviving, like, scavenging resources, trying not to get hit by a sniper. Like, there are cases where they put you into scenarios where you can try to save someone who’s about to be abused by a paramilitary soldier. It can go badly, you can end up harmed or killed, and then what happens with the people who live in your house now that you didn’t come home that night from scavenging, and, like, their emotional lives? That, understand, how do you do that? It’s really, really successfully beautiful storytelling. There’s nothing else quite like that.
I feel like if you were going to write genre fiction of climate, and you would presuppose that the world is going through hard times, you would want to write it in such a way as that it doesn’t have to be nearly so dramatic, because not all things related to climate change severity will be nearly so extreme. In some cases it truly will be, but that’s the kind of humanizing that I think tells a good climate story, one that is not abstract. It’s not polar bears, it’s not parts per million, but it’s about individual lives and tribulations. I think that’s where it would need to go.
Daniel Backer: I think you’re right, yeah. Well, it’s making me reflect on that. It’s like, yeah, it is kind of hard to personalize a problem that doesn’t have a lot of personal experience to it. It’s like, obviously there are different natural disasters that are being attributed to climate change today, so there’s always that angle. But, like, I think for your average person in the suburbs in the Midwest, even if they believe in climate change, it’s not a very in-your-face problem for them. So, like, evoking those particularities might pose a challenge, unless you go straight apocalypse, where we’re fast-forwarding to collapse, knock on wood. But that’s, I think, how you would maybe create more of a genre tale, is to make it more of a personal experience for that protagonist.
Ross Kenyon: There’s also so much apocalyptic fiction too. It’s just, I don’t see any of it being climate. Or, I wonder if part of it’s politics, because a lot of the survivalist literature is quite right-wing. I’ve read a couple, I’ve started a couple. There were all these dog whistles. I’ll be like, what was that last thing he said? I was like, I’m pretty sure I know where this is going. And there’s a lot that you could just tell are written by quite lonely men. Lonely men in bunkers are writing bad books out there.
Daniel Backer: I’m unsurprised to learn this now.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. There’s actually, like, so the best zombie books are written by a woman in Oregon that I’ve read, where I felt like they had actually, like, really developed characters relative for the genre, and was pretty impressed by. But it was such a — in some ways it’s such a low bar, you’re like, oh, it’s not just, like, a gruff former special forces soldier trying to save everybody. Oh, it’s someone who actually has doubts and concerns and fears and mixed emotions about things. Wow, that’s pretty [unclear]. It’s a low bar, isn’t it? Kind of. Maybe I should write this. Maybe I could. Do people care about climate change? Would they want to read a series like this? I don’t know.
Daniel Backer: Well, yeah, because, like, especially — I’m not as familiar with this style or the genres much, but, like, from what it’s sounding like, is this a little bit of, like, wish-fulfillment on the author’s part?
Ross Kenyon: People, many of these people will be disappointed if an EMP does not destroy all cars past 1978 or whatever. That’s the vibe that I get. And, you know, I mean, I don’t think that’s the worst thing in the world. It kind of makes me think of the Onion headline that’s like, man imagines himself to be four times as effective in a fight as he actually is. I’m terrible at remembering funny things when I try to reproduce them.
Daniel Backer: That’s great. I know the one you’re talking about. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, I mean, that’s kind of what it strikes me as. But then I think that that’s ripe for parody too. My head immediately goes to, like, Tropic Thunder — the, like, special forces guy, but they’re really kind of, et cetera, is in the performance of the vet and acting weirder than that character type in general. So yeah, I think there’s a lot to play with there, for sure.
Ross Kenyon: Maybe I should. It sounds fun. Although writing projects are so — so did we ever watch, you know, that Hamlet 2 clip from when he’s trying to write Hamlet 2, when he was, like, crying?
Daniel Backer: Yeah, he’s, like, crying at, like, the beauty of it. And, like, layered, that movie — as you, are you too? And I love, like, the cut after he’s crying and he looks at his cat and goes, who the hell do you think you are?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, he’s, like, walking around with just his shirt and, like, no underwear on, like, playing on, like, a handheld keyboard. Like, yeah, that’s writing. I’ve always felt, like, on the brink of madness writing a large project.
Daniel Backer: Oh, one hundred percent. I think that is part of the fun, and I have definitely cried while writing something before. I’m not saying that it was good, but, like, yeah, I think you do kind of have to work yourself up into different places and mind that in a lot of ways.
Ross Kenyon: One of the other series I read — I gave up on it, but it was very much like being a boat bum in South Florida, and it was basically like an extended Jimmy Buffett song. So if you were a fan of anything Jimmy Buffett —
Daniel Backer: Absolutely not.
Ross Kenyon: You could just exist in that world where you’re, like, kind of a smuggler, but you’re not, like, one of the mean, like, cartel smugglers, you’re, like, one of the cool, like, Hawaiian shirt guys just trying to make a little, like, dirtbag living. There’s something about it that I found really comforting, and also quite — there’s got to be a better word than genre — it’s just tropey and repetitive, but good anyways. Something. I’ve got to write this now. Is that where we’re headed? Are we agreed?
Daniel Backer: Yeah, I think so. I expect it on my desk in two weeks. Get going.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, good grief. Well, I’m actually happy — we don’t talk about climate stuff nearly enough, I think. And hopefully, you know, how do you intend this? Postmodernism, metamodernism, a whole bunch of weird literary ramblings. I hope you enjoy it. I think it’s safe to say that there’s nothing else like this in the entire climate podcasting space. So for better or for worse, it now exists.
Daniel Backer: Well, yeah, I’m glad to be a part of it. Thanks for calling me up. We — I think we planned this initially maybe two and a half years ago, so I’m glad we made good.
Ross Kenyon: I’m glad we made good too. Well, thanks for being on the show. Hey, thanks for listening. Hope you enjoyed this show. It was a fun one, an oddball one, and one that is near and dear to my heart. If you like what we’re doing here — I don’t know if your app has a rating service on it, but many of them do. Apple Podcasts, Spotify, give us a great rating and review. Help us get this out to more people, and thanks so much for listening. Thank you so much for listening. If you could, please subscribe and give us a great rating and review on Apple Podcasts, or a rating on Spotify. That’d be much appreciated. It helps us get our content out to more people. You can sign up for our newsletter at nori.com, follow us on social media, and we will catch you next time.
