Summer Reading: T.C. Boyle Talks ‘Blue Skies,’ Life in Santa Barbara and More

Summer Reading:
T.C. Boyle Talks ‘Blue Skies,’
Life in Santa Barbara
and More

The Godfather of Climate Fiction
Sounds Off on His Latest Work

By David Starkey | Photos by Ingrid Bostrom
July 13, 2023

“Brilliantly imaginative … in a terrifying way,” is how fellow author Annie Proulx describes T.C. Boyle. As famed New York Times literary critic Michiko Kakutani wrote of one of Santa Barbara’s most prolific and beloved writers, “When it comes to pitch-black humor, Grand Guignol slapstick, and linguistic acrobatics, T. Coraghessan Boyle is a master of his domain.”

Boyle sat down with Independent contributing writer David Starkey (Santa Barbara Poet Laureate 2009–2011, novelist, and playwright) to discuss the writing life in S.B. and his new novel, Blue Skies, “an eco-thriller with teeth” that captures the absurdity and “inexpressible sadness at the heart of everything.” 

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Your new novel, Blue Skies, offers a bleak, but probably accurate, view of the near future. Drought, fires, and incredibly high temperatures in Southern California, hurricanes and flooding in Florida. And yet people carry on. Is that an optimistic note on your part — that we persist — or a comment on how blind we are to keep accommodating our own increasingly disastrous messes?  Blue Skies is a companion to my 2000 book, A Friend of the Earth, which projects to 2026 and wonders what life would be like at this juncture that we’ve almost reached. And in it, there are the same kind of weather dislocations I’m talking about in Blue Skies. We have drought, we have floods, and we also have a pandemic. I saw all that coming. And now, I thought, we are living in it, and what is it like for a single family — like us, regular people — to have to deal with the new normal? Do we ignore it? Do we try to do our best to ameliorate things? And so I’ve given you a family. The mother and son live here in Santa Barbara and the daughter has recently moved to coastal Florida. So I can contrast the different conditions: They have too much water and we haven’t got enough.