What kind of feeling do you get when you finish a piece of writing and it goes out into the world?
It feels great when I physically come to the end of a book and write the final sentence in a fury of passion. Afterwards, it’s gone. When the book comes back to me months later, I’m already doing something else, and have lost interest in what’s past. So it’s the process itself that’s exhilarating.
After all this incessant plundering of the earth’s riches, is there any hope left for the world?
Very little. I think we’re going to have a world of increasing climate change, more storms, longer monsoons, unusual flooding, drying up of water sources, and the inability to grow food at certain times. Eventually, it’ll catch up with us, and then there’ll be climate refugees, leading to food, water, and shelter crises, not to mention the diseases that go with those. That’s an extreme scenario which may or may not happen, but it’s certainly within the realm of possibilities.