The Beating Heart: A Guest Post by John Larison
What will we leave the generations to come, and how to we best prepare them for the future? John Larison’s new novel The Ancients follows three siblings surviving each day in an unforgiving post-apocalyptic world. Read on for Larison’s exclusive essay on where the inspiration for this book sparked, down below.
Hardcover $30.00
The Ancients: A Novel
The Ancients: A Novel
By John Larison
In Stock Online
Hardcover $30.00
A riveting story about three siblings surviving in a post-apocalyptic world and their mother who will stop at nothing to reunite with them.
A riveting story about three siblings surviving in a post-apocalyptic world and their mother who will stop at nothing to reunite with them.
The Ancients was born on a beach, in Oregon, on an unseasonably warm winter day. I had driven my three kids, aged 5 to 8, from the foggy inland valley where we live to the sunny shore. I was wearing a sweater, yet upon seeing those bright waves, my son and daughters stripped to their undies and ran for the tide.
As I watched them splashing in knee-high surf, I felt two urgent impulses. First, I wanted to call them back from the danger that is the ocean. Second, I wanted to let them play, to have this happy moment as siblings together sharing a childhood.
Standing with towels at the ready, I found myself thinking about the timelessness of this situation. For as long as there have been people on Earth, there must have been children who delighted in jumping through waves. For as long as children have played in the sea, there must have been parents on shore standing in worry and wonder.
I felt it then: here was the emotional heart of my next novel—the book I had to write. It would be called The Ancients.
Every fact in a novel might be made up, but every word must be true. To find truth, I feel for the beating heart of conflicted human emotion. When I find it, I let myself linger there against the pulse, listening until I hear the voice that can carry this emotion onto the page.
A novel is more than a story, though. My favorites are explorations of some truth that other disciplines can’t hope to illuminate. I understood that The Ancients was to become an exploration of the timelessness of the human experience across our deep-history.
Back home, in my office, I began to dig into the project—learning, growing, writing. I was especially drawn to researching those moments in human history when our lives were upended by a changing climate.
One particular event captivated me. 200,000 years ago, the Earth’s weather shifted radically, and all of Africa became wind-swept dunes, except for a fringe of green along the southern coast. There our ancestors persevered on a diet of fish and sea-greens.
Over three years, I wrote three versions of the novel set in the deep past, but I was still learning so much about human history, and each version felt insufficient to the totality of the truth as I now understood it.
One day, I came across planetary models of our possible future: what Earth will look like at 3 degrees of warming, 5 degrees and so on. At 8 degrees Celsius—what climate scientists often consider the worst-case scenario, I saw Africa again returned to dunes. North and South America too. I thought, Wow, humans have survived this before, and with less!
In an instant the novel took shape. The Ancients didn’t refer to people long ago. The Ancients were us. The book I needed to write wasn’t about our greatest grandparents; it was about our children.
