When the world is underwater, what will we save? A new dystopian novel explores the answer

When superstorm Sandy wreaked havoc on Eiren Caffall’s childhood home of New York City, her first thought was: What about the museums?

That distressing question provoked her first novel, “All the Water in the World.” In this futuristic dystopia, climate change is unchecked. Cities are drowned, people are adrift. But already, some are thinking of the after by looking to the past. The former curators and researchers at the American Natural History Museum have taken up residence on the museum’s roof, forming a new sort of family and thinking about how to preserve the artifacts still in their power.

“Museums are … the repositories of our collective understandings, evidence of discoveries, warehouses of materials that will fuel discoveries in the future,” writes Caffall. “They hold the past in trust for the future.”

This week, Caffall joins host Kerri Miller to talk about the hope she wants to see in dystopian fiction.

“The narratives we have in the popular culture about what disasters do to people are mostly incorrect,” she says. “There isn’t usually vast looting or mass violence. There’s usually a coming together of people trying to remake community, trying to support each other, trying to think about what happens in the aftermath.”

“To me, that’s a more interesting, more important, maybe more feminine story about what it takes to rebuild.”

Guest:

• Eiren Caffall is a musician, writer and researcher. Her first novel is “All the Water in the World.”

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