Thea Prieto talks FROM THE CAVES and a changing world with Lily Brooks-Dalton in an interview for Ecotheo Collective!

Ursula K. Le Guin once wrote “Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive,” and back in 2016, when Lily Brooks-Dalton’s post-apocalyptic novel Good Morning, Midnight (Penguin Random House) was released, and when Lily and I discussed early drafts of my post-apocalyptic novella From the Caves, our stories were not supposed to be predictive. In December of 2020, the film adaptation of Good Morning, Midnight—titled The Midnight Sky, starring and directed by George Clooney—premiered to an audience much more terribly acquainted with global disasters and extreme isolation. In August of 2021, the release of From the Caves (Ren Hen Press), which is set in a wildfire-devastated Pacific Northwest, coincided with the one-year anniversary of the 2020 California lightning siege, which forced my family and I, among thousands of others, to evacuate our homes before the largest fires in California history. These events led Lily and I to discuss what it means to write about the end of the world in the midst of cataclysmic change, and the importance of exploring human endurance and hope through fiction writing.