While some of us try to avoid thinking about the future, others spend their time asking ‘what if?’ and reporting back with the results. From Briohny Doyle (The Island Will Sink), Marlee Jane Ward (Welcome to Orphancorp) and Justin Cronin (The Passage) come three very different takes on where our flaws (or, well, vampire plagues) will take us. In this episode of the KYD Podcast, we ask them how they construct their futuristic worlds, and why they choose to do so.

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Meaghan Dew (KYD): Hello, and welcome back to the Kill Your Darlings Podcast. I’m Meaghan and I’ll be your host as we speak to Justin Cronin about coming to the end of the Passage trilogy and to Marlee Jane Ward about the future of Welcome to Orphancorp. But first, we’ll start with Briohny Doyle, whose debut novel The Island Will Sink, is the November Kill Your Darlings First Book Club pick. It’s also the first novel published by The Lifted Brow. In it, Max Galleon, blockbuster disaster movie director, plans the ultimate end of the world narrative while his own memories slip through his fingers.

First off, congratulations on selling out your first print run.

Briohny Doyle: I think it sold out by October, so I think it was, like, two months and we sold it out, and we did a second print run, and we’re coming towards the end of the second print run, and we’re doing a third print run. So it’s pretty crazy.

KYD: Yikes, I need to revise my congratulations – double congratulations then, or something?

BD: (LAUGHS). Not quite, not quite. I’m jumping the gun, I mean, we haven’t completely sold out our second print run, but they did say at the warehouse that the levels were getting low so we should restock, yeah.

KYD: So The Island Will Sink isn’t your only experience with the end of the world narratives, I hear –I think I’ve heard you described as a Doctor of Apocalypses. Would you care to elaborate a tad on that?

BD: Sure. So did my PhD Thesis on apocalyptic narratives, and specifically the function of apocalyptic narratives, like, how they function, how they have functioned in history and different things that they’re used for. So I kind of did more traditional apocalypses, biblical apocalypse, and then I started talking and thinking about contemporary apocalypse, and the function of revelation in the contemporary moment. And also contemporary post-apocalypse – the idea of a post-apocalypse is that it withholds revelation, so yeah, that’s what I was thinking about the duration of my PhD.

KYD: That sounds like it also simultaneously would have been some pretty damn good research for your book as well, which is very sneaky of you.

BD: Yeah, totally!

KYD: So one of the things you probably would have touched on is that novels and things speculate on the future, and particularly, possibly problematic parts of the future are usually shaped in large part by the concerns and preoccupations and technological developments of the present era. Did anything happen in the process while you were writing your book that you then had to sort of revise your idea of this future you were creating?

BD: Oh yeah, I don’t know if you know, but I have been wri