Interview with Brian Burt, author of “In the Tears of God”

Here is my interview with fellow author Brian Burt, who also writes climate fiction. I enjoyed meeting Brian online and working with him to exchange interview.

I just finished Aquarius Rising. I really enjoyed the book, so I’ll start with thanking you for giving me a copy.  As I mentioned when we started this conversation a few months ago, I’m interested in other authors who write climate fiction.

For the sake of my readers, I’ll start with some context:  Aquarius Rising is an action/adventure novel set in a far future where the land has been ravaged by geo-engineering gone bad, and the sea is full of colonies of humans adapted to the sea with bioengineering that went well.  It’s a great set-up, and if I say anything else it could be a spoiler.  So on to the interview questions:

Brenda: Your world building is excellent.  I felt that you had created a post-apocalyptic world that made sense and you were consistent and clear as you described the world. It was also unique. Can you talk a little about the process you went through to create the world? What was the most fun, and why?

Brian Burt: I admit I had a blast fleshing out the details of this fictional world. I actually wrote a short story originally, “Neptune’s Children,” inspired by this vision of human-dolphin hybrids swimming through the ruins of drowned coastal cities, transforming them into reef communities. Honestly, the short story wasn’t very good. I couldn’t do justice to the vision in that abbreviated format. So the tale grew into a novel, then a trilogy. As someone from the Midwest, far from any ocean shoreline, I loved researching the marine ecosystems and creatures who might populate this world. I learned so much, and every discovery triggered more ideas. It’s trite, but we’ve explored the surface of the Moon in more detail than the ocean depths. That aura of mystery provides incredibly rich soil (or sand