The map had been the first form of misdirection, for what is a map but a way of emphasizing some things and making other things invisible?

Trust your imagination. Don't be afraid to fail. Write. Revise. Revise. Revise.

I don't believe that climate-change fiction will change the mind of a denier because most of the deniers I've met are basically in a cult situation. It's a faith issue. It's not a rational issue. There's no fact that's going to change their mind. They simply believe in the cult of climate-change denial and it somehow feeds into the rest of the mythos of their own life story.

I have received emails from readers who have said that they were emotionally impacted by the books, and they feel they are more environmentally aware and energized to do more. So that's hopeful to me. It is at least evidence of what I'm trying to do - trying to convey very intense emotional experiences by being very close in on character points of view to make you feel it in your body. That's one way to get the point across, by evoking a visceral response.

Once you realize there's less logic in human institutions than you once thought, you see the narrative potential in just about everything around you. Sometimes, in fact, it seems as if the human world runs on inefficiency and erratic behavior.

I have always tended toward a lush prose style, but I take care to modulate it from story to story and to strip it down entirely when necessary.

We should feel an urgency about our environment and what's been done to it by human action and inaction. I wouldn't say there's a resurgence - I think it's been with us all along, and especially since the 1960s and 1970s, but it is true that there's almost a subsection of the bookstore devoted to it now. Personally, I've been addressing these issues in my long and short fiction since the late 1980s - basically since the beginning of my career.