S1E122 - Carrot Quinn on "Bets" & Writing the Apocalypse

Episode Summary

This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Carrot Quinn comes on to talk to Inmn about her new book "BETS," and about how writing speculative fiction can help inform how we live through the apocalypses we're currently facing. Carrot also reads a chapter from the book, which is out now on Kickstarter.

Guest Info

Carrot Quinn is the author of "Thru-Hiking Will Break Your Heart" and "The Sunset Route", as well as eleven thousand miles of daily hiking blogs at carrotquinn.com and a weekly newsletter at substack.com/@carrotquinn

Bets is a speculative fiction novel being self-published by Carrot Quinn. You can back it on Kickstarter at www.kickstarter.com/projects/carrotquinn/bets-a-speculative-fiction-novel-by-carrot-quinn

<h4>"The cities are dying. Bets escapes just in time to save her own life. But where will she go? She's heard that somewhere in the desert, people have found a way to be free..."</h4>

Host Info

Inmn can be found on Instagram @shadowtail.artificery

Publisher Info

This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness.

Transcript

Live Like the World is Dying: Carrot Quinn on “BETS” and Writing the Apocalypse

**Inmn ** 00:14 Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm your host today, Inmn Neruin, and today we get to talk to one of my favorite authors, which is a really fun thing for me and a really fun--hopefully--a really fun thing for listeners out there. And today we're going to be talking to Carrot Quinn about a new book, a book about the apocalypse, a book about bikes, a book about the desert. These are all of the things that I want to talk about all the time. And I think that...I think it's going to be a great conversation. We haven't had the conversation yet. So I'm assuming some things, but I have high hopes. But first, we are a member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchists podcasts, and here's a jingle from another show on that network. [sorta singing] Doo doo doo doo doo.

**Inmn ** 01:59 And we're back. Thank you so much for coming on the show today, Carrot. Could you introduce yourself with your name, pronouns, and just a little bit about what you...? What do you do in the world?

**Carrot ** 02:13 Thanks for having me, Inmn. I'm really excited to be here. My name is Carrot Quinn and I use she or they pronouns and I am a writer. I live in Alaska. I used to live in Tucson. And I write books and I do outdoors stuff. I do these guided backpacking trips that are fun, and I have to chihuahua mixes.

**Inmn ** 02:41 Cool. Hell yeah. And we've had you on the show before to talk about things like long distance hiking, and it it, like one of your previous books, just made me want to go out and walk long distances, which I have not done yet. But hopefully might [forlornly] someday. I was wondering if we could just start off by, could you tell us a little bit about your book and about the kind of world and setting, before we, I believe, you have a chapter prepared to read for us.

**Carrot ** 03:18 Yeah, totally. So I wrote a speculative fiction novel called "Bets" that will be out in January of 2025. And it is set in a near future, sort of post collapse western United States. And one reason, the reason I started working on this novel four years ago, I think the reason we all.... You know, everyone's who's writing speculative fiction right now, like what draws us to it is all of these things we see sort of coming down the pike around the world and in the US with climate with all these different things, and we're all trying to imagine like, what's going to happen? How's it going to happen? How's it going to feel when it happens? And what are we going to do? And so, starting to write this novel four years ago, which felt like a really therapeutic experience for me, because I imagined what if this young person was living in a city in the Western United States, and the city was collapsing, and she needed to flee and she needed to ride her bike across the desert to try and find people who had found a way to survive, who she could join living in the desert. Like, what would that be like? Like, who would she encounter? What would the, you know.... Who, if she met people on the road, what would they be like? What shape would the roads been? What would she eat? Where would she find water? What skills would she need? And, trying to imagine this as kind of a thought exercise was really comforting to me. It's sort of, I feel like we...one thing that fiction does for us is we can put ourselves in these scenarios and try and imagine how we would respond emotionally and how they would feel for us, and that and that almost makes us feel prepared for things that might happen, even if they don't ever happen. It's like this very comforting thing. And so I created this character who's living the city. And the rural United States, like Western rural United States, at least--I don't even really talk about the rest of the country because I didn't actually build that part of this world--but the western United States has been abandoned. Because, you know, the first thing, one of the first things to go, was international supply chains in the US, which basically destroyed the entire economy and the ability to access most goods. And then the rural United States, also there is like water scarcity and a lot of contamination and different things. Disease, because of the lack of access to different medical care, and so people in the rural United States, it just emptied out, and they all went to what was left of the cities. And the cities are these precarious places in this world where, you know, it's impossible to find housing, and most people live in these encampments. And it's really hard to find goods. And it's basically just like, really extremely poor people. And then a handful of like, super wealthy. And the biggest industry left in the US are the prisons, and there's new prisons being built all the time because the prisons have slave labor. So that's like a source of goods. So that's like, the US economy is really reliant on this source of goods. So things are super criminalized because they want more people in the prisons to create more goods. So this young person, Bets, she's 20, that's the world she grew up in, in the city. She was orphaned when she was really young, cause both her parents were disappeared. She doesn't know where her mom went, which is one of the sort of through-lines of the plot is this mystery. And in the beginning, she gets this clue. And then she's sort of trying to like follow up on that clue on her journey. And she also has this love interest, Georgia. They have like...she has very insecure attachment with Georgia. And we don't know much about Georgia. She's sort of mysterious. And then later in the book, it switches to her perspective. And there's kind of this reveal. And you learn all of these like secrets about her, and how she's par