Virtual Book Tour: DUST BOWL by J.P. Lantern

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BLURB:  

With the world ending around him, Ward flounders for purpose and survival. Resources are gone, disease is rampant, and governments have all but dissolved. The only way off the broken planet is with the Order. Obsessed with technology, the Order is a cult that has developed the means for faster-than-light travel. They claim they can populate the galaxy and save humanity.

Ward joins the Order, inspired by sudden and irrational love for a mysterious beauty named Kansas who saves his life. But quickly, he finds out Kansas and the Order want him to kill adults and kidnap children from across the country. With impressionable youth filling their starships, the Order hopes for their tenets to be spread to all future generations of humanity.

The Order is Ward’s only chance for survival in the wreck the earth has become. Worse than that, those in the Order come to accept him and value his skills for their nightmarish quest across the dystopian landscape of America. But, somewhere inside of him, still, is the strength to strike out on his own and protect whatever good he can find left in the world.

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Being a history buff, I was curious how this story compared with the real Dust Bowl.  Here's what the author had to say:

So I have written a book, Dust Bowl. It is pretty good and I feel like you should go out of your way to buy it—but of course, I am biased because of how all my opinions are completely correct one hundred percent of the time, no questions asked.

 

There was also a very real event/area/historical-type-thing that happened called the Dust Bowl. And any time that you write a book named after an enormous historical thingamajig, there are bound to be correlations made. I think that this is a reasonable thing to do; my task here is going to be to elucidate for you the sort of conceptions I had in mind for correlation as I wrote the novel.

 

The actual Dust Bowl, for those of you who don’t know, was (or is) this enormous patch of land covering the Northern part of Texas, much of Oklahoma, and substantial parts of Nebraska and Kansas. All of this land was made completely non-arable due to poor farming techniques, overuse, and (to my limited recollection from research I did five or six years ago) in large part because of the volume of cattle traveling via cattle drives from Texas to Kansas. This all came to a head during the Great Depression (another horror created by overconsumption and poor business techniques), and as a result enormous portions of rural workers were left without work. Giant dust storms filled the middle of the United States, sometimes shifting over into unaffected areas.

 

There—that’s roughly twenty years of history in five sentences! My history teachers would be proud. Maybe. They were always sort of ornery.

 

The problem today, in our very real life, is that the Dust Bowl is still basically there. We use better techniques on the land, and irrigate it a whole hell of a lot better, but that top soil never fully recovered. So, my novel, among other conceptualizations of our future, imagines what it might be like if that same Dust Bowl extended out—to approximately twice the size it once was.

 

Anytime a person is writing a dystopian novel—which Dust Bowl most certainly is—there are going to be a lot of responses to the societal current of the times. So, I wasn’t just examining the historical Dust Bowl and applying it to a dystopia, but also making comparisons to the historical Dust Bowl, the state of the world now, and then finally all of that to what I conceived as a possible route for the future.

 

So, the historical Dust Bowl gave rise to a lot of desperate people doing desperate things to survive. Government intervention was difficult because with the land being non-arable, it was hard to justify trying to fix the problems that were there. I think both of these things arrive in various forms today (desperate people acting desperately and the difficulty of governmental intervention—for whatever reason—for various problems) and they certainly are present in my novel.

 

Currently, huge portions of the world are in the middle of a drought (there are portions of the Southwest that have been at drought-levels for something like twenty years), and we keep being told that the Great Recession is receding even though full-time jobs are just as hard to find as they have been since the beginning of the crash.  Both of those things were going on during the Depression. We’ve already looked at the former, but for the latter, Hoover would constantly come on the radio and talk to people about how bad the Depression “was.”

 

So, the “Dust Bowl” referred to the title of my book is both physical and metaphysical. It’s very physical in the sense that most of the book takes place in where the historical Dust Bowl was located—in the Northern tips of Texas, through Oklahoma and bits of Kansas. In all of these places, the Dust Bowl has come back with a vengeance, producing horrendous dust storms and making the land non-arable. People survive by the skin of their teeth—outside of cities with special wind-shields and enclosed neighborhoods and the like, life is extremely hard and largely goes without assistance from anyone, including any kind of government (which all have sort of withdrawn like some ignoble tortoise within their shells).

 

It’s also used in a sort of metaphysical way. Ward, the main character, is an addict and so leads a kind of barren emotional life most of the time. But, his emotions are all still there, they’re just not attached to anything very well, so they swirl about his consciousness, and occasionally come down in these huge storms of love or violence or attachment that are most destructive. So the Dust Bowl is a nice sort of metaphor for that.

 

I can also view it in the sense of how we have all these underpinnings of society that help us work together and bring us closer together, and when a society isn’t working toward common goals or looking after each other, all you’re left with is wreckage that isn’t really useful for anything. That’s not a particular focus of the book, but it’s always there in the background, like the dust.

 

I sincerely doubt that what I write about will ever come to pass in the form that I write about it—I am not so very lucky (or possibly cursed) to be a prophet. But I do think that there are portions of history that are rather cyclical, and so as I formed this novel I tried to pay attention to history to make sure that I wrote with an aura of verisimilitude. But even with all this attention to history as a backdrop—ultimately this is a story all about characters and how they try to make their lives work in an increasingly tough world. I think that’s something anybody can relate to. Those characters and their decisions—often self-destructive and (I hope) exciting and engaging—that’s the main event for this tale.

Excerpt

“Would you be willing to kill a thousand parents so that there might be a thousand million more in the future? Would you orphan a thousand children just so they could foster thousands of their own? That is not a name put to courage. That is not something you don’t understand. That is something very simple to understand, you just don’t have the will to do it yourself. That is a name put to strength. To resolve. That’s what a set is.”

There was a light in the office behind the booth, flickering every so often and casting strange, tentacled shadows into the room. Joe looked at Ward and his face was sagging with fear. Maybe understanding had not quite dawned in the liquored canals of his mind but it showed in his eyes, and Ward felt satisfied for the first time all day.

Joe shook his head. “Why you telling me this?”

“I thought you should know what’s going to happen here.”

“Just what exactly is that gonna be,” asked Joe.  “Or have you told me already?

Ward looked at him for a moment and took his gun out of its holster. He laid it on to the table with his hand resting on it, just in case he needed it. In his imaginings, usually people tried to run.

“Every adult here is going to die. One by one, mostly. Some of this will be done by me.”

The eyes of Joe stayed fixated on the gun on the table.

AUTHOR INFORMATION:

 

J.P. Lantern lives in the Midwestern US, though his heart and probably some essential parts of his liver and pancreas and whatnot live metaphorically in Texas. He writes speculative science fiction short stories, novellas, and novels which he has deemed "rugged," though he would also be fine with "roughhewn" because that is a terrific and wonderfully apt word.
Full of adventure and discovery, these stories examine complex people in situations fraught with conflict as they search for truth in increasingly violent and complicated worlds.

Links:

www.jplantern.com

www.facebook.com/jplanternbooks

Amazon Author Page:

http://www.amazon.com/J.P.-Lantern/e/B00E46H16C


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12/16/2013 SECOND STOP MichaelSciFan
12/17/2013 Andi's Book Reviews
12/18/2013 Long and Short Reviews
12/19/2013 Bunny's Review
12/20/2013 It's Raining Books
12/30/2013 The Cerebral Writer
12/31/2013 Musings and Ramblings
1/1/2014 Straight from the Library
1/2/2014 Unabridged Andra
1/3/2014 Kit 'N Kabookle

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