World Made By Hand Q&A

James Howard Kunstler took some time away from his schedule to answer questions from class, for a book we read in 2016. Here we have them!

Many novels about the future extrapolate only one theme. Your novel covers terrorism, climate change, scarcity, suburban planning, sustainability, justice, and more. What inspired you to break the mold of those one-theme novels about the future?

JHK: I was not engaged in any deliberate mold-breaking, just trying to write a story about the future with full human dimension. I am astounded at how dumb other futurist material is — for instance, the “Mad Max” movie series, which portrays the post-petroleum world as an endless car chase. Say what??? All that really shows is our culture’s generally inability to actually think beyond the present. I can’t really account for why other writers do what they do.

Would religion be the most likely force to unite or divide people in a post-collapse world?

JHK: It divides people enough at all times in history. I was after something a little different in the World Made By Hand series. I wanted to show how the disappointments of science and technology (which led to collapse) would morph into a different way of perceiving the world. At best, you could call it the re-enchantment of everyday life. A worst, you could call it a retreat into superstition. The main point was that the ordinary people of my fictional town, Union Grove, had been let down by the broken promises that technology would rescue them from collapse.

Is your novel arguing for justice that is absolute, with laws that are explicit, or relative, where laws are relevant to the environment and times?

JHK: The problem of lawlessness is a theme that runs through all four WMBH books — and, of course, the search for justice. I am trying to illustrate how fragile all the inter-dependent systems of civilized life are. The people of Union Grove have lost many of the fundamental cultural infrastructure needed to hold a society together. The law exists in cultural memory, but the institutions for applying it are gone — the courts, the systems of record-keeping, the law schools and journals, the multi-layered police organizations. They respond by trying to rebuild it locally on a much simpler basis — the town magistrate. It remains problematic through all four books.

What has changed in Union Grove to make Robert & Loren think they can go after Wayne Karp and his followers?

JHK: The arrival in town of the New Faith Brotherhood, with some capable men who have military experience. This is not explicit but it is the chief take-away from the preceding episode in which Robert and several New Faith Brothers rescue the boatmen in Albany — the idea that they are now able to act, to fight back.

Is Robert’s shift from Jane Ann to Brittany meant to be seen as morally faulty or good?

JHK: No, I am not offering any moral judgments for the reader. What happens is simply circumstantial — things happen to people and they must respond somehow, make choices. Robert is moved to help Britney largely out of human empathy for her situation — a woman left alone with a child in a harsh world with no social services. But it is also a transactional thing — Robert gets something in return, a companion and housemate, in effect, a wife, plus a child to replace his own lost children. It’s not a metaphysical thing.

What factors or experiences most prepared the characters to survive in a “world made by hand”?

JHK: Obviously their ability to adapt to the requirements of the new times — the basic skills they possess, their willingness to work hard, endure hardships, to grapple with reality. In short, you can see in these characters the qualities of personality needed to survive enormous loss without retreating into psychological dysfunction. Someone said — and I think this is true — that one of the hallmarks of our current situation is the sheer inability to discern the difference between mental illness and mental health. This gets sorted out in a World Made By Hand.

Would you define this novel as Science Fiction? Why or why not?

JHK: I’m not concerned with how people label it — except for the convenience of librarians or product managers at Amazon.com. Personally, I have had nearly zero interest in what is commonly called “science fiction” over the years. Especially anything about Space. Uchhh…. I regard science fiction per se as a sort of fever dream accompaniment to the travails of living in the industrial age. The WMBH books are simply novels set in the future.

To what degree is the novel a description of things to come?

JHK: I attempted to create a plausible picture of a possible future. Because history — or what might be called the Human project — is an emergent phenomenon — it is a very slippery dynamic necessarily hard to predict. I’ve done my best to create a coherent story. In the end, the job of the story teller is not to predict the future but to suspend the reader’s disbelief and engage him / her / it / xe in the emotions and predicaments of the characters in a fully-imagined world.