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Justin Cronin
Tim Llewellyn Photography
NEW YORK — Justin Cronin has spent a decade writing and publishing the bestselling The Passage trilogy, an overarching story about a dystopian near-future America overrun by vampires.
Now the 60-year-old author is back with his first novel since Series concluded With the movie “The City of Mirrors” in 2016. What’s up? A dystopia, of course. “The Ferryman” hit shelves last week Penguin Random House.
“I didn’t sit down and say to myself, ‘I’m going to write another dystopia,'” Cronin told CNBC in an interview Tuesday at a bustling restaurant in lower Manhattan.
“I was writing from a different place, and I didn’t spend a minute thinking about the ways The Passage was different or similar,” said Cronin, who teaches at Rice University in Houston.
Other than the fact that they’re both in a terrible future, there isn’t much to connect “The Ferryman” to “The Passage.” The new book is set largely on a luxurious island called Prospira, a scenic, high-tech home for the white-collar upper class.
It’s told mostly through the lens of the 42-year-old title character, Proctor Bennett, who helps the island’s older residents “retire” – meaning erasing their memories and regenerating bodies on another, more mysterious island off the coast of Prospira. . Soon, though, storm clouds develop, both literally and figuratively, as Proctor realizes that perhaps his entertainment life isn’t quite what it’s cracked up to be.
Think of it as Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” by way of the 1970s sci-fi classic “Logan’s Run,” but in an age of catastrophic climate change, and the heavenly ambitions of billionaire space corporate heads.
Cronin spoke to CNBC about how his concerns about the economy helped him achieve his vision for “The Ferryman,” offering his thoughts on how the Covid pandemic has changed society, and explaining how one remark his father made at dinner led to his obsession with disaster.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What’s different about a dystopia these days? Has Covid had an effect on how you view it?
One of the things we have learned from Covid is that the actual crisis is happening much more slowly than we like to imagine. It’s less dramatic. There is a lot of dead time. The fictional Pandemic I created was a sweeping cloud of death descending upon the planet Earth, when in reality it is a slow, frustrating thing that happens over longer periods of time. There are moments of deep crisis and there is a lot of paperwork.
Metaphorically, it corresponds to the ways the disaster changed my life. … The global catastrophe when I grew up with it was such a quick, thorough, complete thing, it took about 40 minutes. A global nuclear exchange of the kind I grew up thinking about, as an adult, was off the table. It won’t happen. There was a very specific arrangement, both military and political, that no longer exists. What we have is this kind of slow-moving disaster, and it’s just as devastating. But they’re also hard to defend against in some ways because you can ignore them for a really, really long time.
The wealthy can afford to beat it better.
They are not motivated to change. Everything that is wrong in the world is solvable. Climate change is solvable. We all have this technology. We can do that tomorrow. But there is no political will or structure to achieve this due to the upward flow of capital to a very narrow bandwidth of people. I don’t mean to sound revolutionary on CNBC, but this is a story throughout history that never ends well. It never ends well.
In the novel, you have an island community of wealthy people. And then, next to it, crammed into substandard lodgings, and very low wages, and the population four or five times that size, some people have to drink wine and some people have to pour wine. There is much more of them than there is in the – lost term – entertainment category. We no longer use this term. …this is the world we live in. It gets worse every hour.
People start thinking about things like universal basic income when you hear about AI taking over all those menial office jobs and tasks.
It will not be just menial tasks. I’m in the English department in college. Everyone is asking what we do about ChatGPT and student papers. I’m like, who cares? We need to think about where this will be in five years or 10 years, after we’ve spent a decade here interacting with the entire data architecture of the human species. For example, I’m glad my career as a novelist may have taken another 10 years. At some point I will do something else. Writers are retiring! Because I believe that an enormous amount of cultural content, from films to novels etc. will be quickly and inexpensively produced by AI.
There is an inflection point in The Ferryman. Everything is about to change in this society, for these characters. What did you take advantage of to capture the paranoia and anxiety of some characters and the apathy of others?
I know people like all the people in the book. I haven’t had money for many years, to be perfectly clear. And so I knew, befriended, and had a life inhabited by people from every corner of the economy. As a writer, you have to walk many different streets, many different ways, to know these things. What you learn is to become a good observer of human behavior in general. If you look at a problem like convulsions – your readers may hate the term – late stage capitalism, sooner or later you get the poor broke and they can’t buy anything you’re selling.
What do you think will lead us to the point where we take climate change and other big problems seriously?
I don’t know. One of the things is that we have been changed by technology. Something comes along and rewrites the rules. Even in the absence of political will, even in the absence of strong disincentives to change, things come and make it happen.
All the rules have been rewritten for everything. You can’t even walk into a restaurant right now and read the menu without your phone. We’ve forced these technologies into people’s lives to work, and they’re carving out new neural pathways. I look at my kids, and I know their brains work differently. And this has been exacerbated by Covid, which has played a part in this change, making us into this kind of screen star.
I think all the problems we’re facing now, we’re going to have in increasing amounts until something catastrophic happens. Except for the fact that I have no idea what the AI ​​will do, and all bets are off. The bets are off.
With “The Ferryman,” the concept of a metaverse was clearly in mind. Did the AI ​​factor into your thinking at all while writing it?
No, I honestly wasn’t thinking of that. It is a reliable technology in the world of new, ultra-fast and intelligent computing. Admittedly, we have outgrown this danger, but we have not outgrown climate change as a risk. Choose your disaster! It’s a very long list. I couldn’t write about them all at the same time.
The writers’ social concerns, and the writers’ more abstract cosmic concerns move in tandem. The worry I have about what will happen in the next twenty or thirty years, these are the fears I will hand over to the next generation. And they will pass it on to their children, and so on. The book’s celestial concerns, of which there are many, I think are just deep human questions that exist outside any particular social discourse.
What do you think of the billionaire space race?
This was kind of an example of this. On the one hand, I was promised as a boy – it was a promise – We were going to occupy space now. He was born in 1962, and watched the moon landing on a black and white TV screen. We would have been on Mars by the mid-70s. Star Trek was real. 2001: A Space Odyssey, Journey to Jupiter. It’s a huge disappointment for me, personally, that we haven’t conquered outer space.
Is there a reason I should care? no. I just do. But having said that, Elon Musk’s starship, this shiny bullet of a spaceship, this is the spaceship I was promised. The image of that spacecraft, the way it actually looks, is on the cover of most science fiction pulps I read as a kid. It’s very exciting to me in a no-nonsense way.
We have other problems to work out, to be completely honest. My wife is quick to point out how much of an empty testosterone fest. Do we really need to settle on the Moon or Mars? I think it would be interesting if we did that, and it would change our sense of ourselves a little bit. But what about free school lunches?
What has the thought of the end of the world done for the better part of the past decade or even your mind?
I’ve been doing it for longer than that. As a kid I knew all about the Cold War and was an armchair expert on every weapon system. I had a copy of one of the founding documents, titled “The Effects of Nuclear War,” which had been prepared (for Congress). I knew all of that. I can tell you about each missile and how it works. … That’s because I was absolutely convinced that it would happen. So I am a household disaster maker. When Covid hit, I was like, we’re running Justin’s disaster machine, let’s go. You are such a general. My wife drove nuts.
So it’s actually kind of a permanent situation. I can still walk on a windy night, play tennis with my boyfriend, ride my bike on weekends, swim in the sea, and enjoy the company of my kids. But there’s always a hum in the background and it’s been there since I was a kid, ever since my dad declared over dinner that he was pretty sure a nuclear weapon would be detonated in an American city during his lifetime, sure, and pass the butter. You were probably in middle school when he said this. And it was my father. He knew it all. This leaves one drop, and thus Catastrophe was born.
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