Benjamin Percy earned a lot of acclaim for a series of books including the short story collections like "Refresh, Refresh" and novels like "The Wilding," but it was with his 2013 novel "Red Moon" that he became a bestselling writer. The book is a werewolf story, but it’s a story about politics, a story about people living with war and a moving and powerful story of being a teenager.
Percy has followed it up with "The Dead Lands," a new novel which is set at a distant point in the future. Most of the human race is dead, the landscape has been altered, and from the city that once was known as St. Louis, a band led by Lewis and Clark set out for the Pacific Ocean. Its a strange fantastic tale, but in this strange landscape, Percy conveys some sense of the strangeness and uncertainty that the original Lewis and Clark faced as they crossed North America.
ALEX DUEBEN: Where did the idea for The Dead Lands start?
BENJAMIN PERCY: I grew up in the shadow of Lewis and Clark, so I guess you could say it began in Oregon, at Fort Clatsop or the bicentennial or any number of historical landmarks along the trail that my family visited so often on weekend adventures. I always wanted to write about the Corps of Discovery. Originally I thought I would take on a nonfiction project–recreating the passage, bringing different people with me along different legs of the journey–but I've got two young kids and that would take an unreasonable toll on my family. Then I thought a historical novel might be fun, but it's been done before. The post-apocalyptic re-imagining–Lewis and Clark 2.0–felt like an exciting way to make their journey feel perilously relevant again.
AD: At what point did you know that you wanted the names of the characters to be Lewis and Clark and Gawea? Plus people like Burr and Jefferson. What was your thinking behind that?
BP: From the very beginning. No one should come to the novel for a history lesson–it's a revisionary future. And you don't need to know anything about the expedition to get swept away by the thrill ride. But there are many Easter eggs for those who know the original saga. Among them the names. Take Aaron Burr for instance. He's a real-life American villain, a strong advocate of slavery who wanted to make the Louisiana Purchase into a separate republic. I took this truth and distorted it when considering a future America, an infant nation trying to rebuild itself.
AD: How much research and thought given into what the landscape would look like under these circumstances as far as what would last and what would decay?
BP: I did quite a lot of research on the effects of time, heat and radiation and the way they would effect the world without us. But I'm bringing only a slippery science to the page. Just enough to key the door open, make you believe in the dark on the other side.
AD: One reason I ask is because your description of North Dakota was chilling. Is that seriously what would happen?
BP: I'm not so sure about the radioactive snow bears...but as for the oil wells flaring and the skies blackening and the toxins poisoning the air and earth, yes, North Dakota would indeed become a kind of real-life Mordor.
AD: Anyone who’s read your previous novels or short stories knows that landscape is important to you. Was it a very different experience writing this book given that you were often reshaping or rethinking the landscape?
BP: The Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of America. And no one (I should say, no white people) really knew what was out there. Some believed wooly mammoths might be roaming around. It was the equivalent of blasting off for the moon. Untold wonders and horrors awaited. The post-apocalyptic reinvention of the landscape allowed me to get into the fearful curiosity the original expedition must have felt.
AD: Did you spend a lot of time figuring out what happened which caused the world to go to heck and how detailed your explanation should be in the book and how much you should just leave unsaid?
BP: The way the world ends doesn't matter so much. I'm more concerned with the way the world is reborn. I do explain some, but just enough to spook the reader and make this future-scape like a what-if possibility.
AD: Did you spend a lot of time deciding how far in the future it should be set? Because unlike a lot of books it's not set a few years from now. Was it important to have a lot of time elapse?
BP: I wanted a good amount of years to have passed and decay to have occurred, so that it felt like a shadow of history, a reversion to old times.
AD: There's a lot of strangeness and well, magic, for lack of a better word. Or maybe you don't think of it in those terms, but I am curious about how you decided on the balance of this being about people facing a difficult landscape and the more fantastic elements.
BP: We live in a time of seeming magic. Whole libraries are crushed down into a tablet. You can build bodies in laboratories. Navigate in driver-less cars. Hold up your phone to the sky and see the constellations highlighted. I put forth a theory for a more elemental technology filling the gap when this world goes up in flames.
AD: Do you have plans to write a sequel or to do more with this world?
BP: Readers will find a doorway at the end of this novel. I hope to keep going. And I hope they'll follow me.
