Empty lots

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Daisy Alioto in conversation with Christopher Brown.

In her 2002 book A Writer's House in Wales, Jan Morris writes: “Just as animal lovers are said to grow to look like their pets, so householders acquire some of the characteristics of their house.” 

If that’s the case, author Christopher Brown is a bit jagged, jutting from the depths of a past excavation and always half-threatening to return to the wild. In his first nonfiction book A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places, Brown’s detailed descriptions of his East Austin home are nested within a larger exploration of the exurban ecologies that have defined his life. (One houseguest compares the home, which has been featured in magazines and documentaries, to a Tarkovsky film.)

“Sometimes our very gaze has a way of banishing the wildness from our world,” Brown writes. But he sets his own gaze free to wander the landscape, dredging up a world where chili seeds can only regerminate by passing through a bird’s gut or mastodon migrations lay the path for interstate highways—which is to say, our world. The one we live in. 

“I have no training in the natural sciences other than the unofficial one my life has given me,” Brown, whose previous books are all science fiction, writes, “And a wariness of our tendency to put the naming of each object in nature before the unmediated experience of it.”

The following interview has been edited and condensed.

Daisy Alioto: Could you talk a little bit about your journey from lawyer to science fiction writer, and then into non-fiction? Was there a catalyst for each of those transitions? 

Christopher Brown: I’ve always been a writer. But I got a public service scholarship as an undergrad so I thought I would go to law school and see what that’s all about. 

I was always trying to do it all, refusing the societal compulsion to specialize. After I moved to Austin, I was writing quasi-experimental short fiction that usually had a fantastical element to it. I had sold my first couple of little stories to literary magazines that were probably one grade above a zine.

But then I got plugged in with this local workshop scene here in Austin that was led by Bruce Sterling. He was one of the original cyberpunks. And he had this monthly workshop, the Turkey City Writer's Workshop. And it was kind of a classic science fiction workshop with a mix of working writers and newbies. That steered me a little more into that kind of genre-focused path and into the markets that existed for that.

But all through that time I was playing around with little bits of nonfiction and criticism here and there. And while I was writing my three novels—Tropic of Kansas, Rule of Capture and Failed State—I was doing the rewilding stuff that I describe in Empty Lots. 

All those books ended up becoming more about climate. And then when I turned in the last book, I had this idea of playing around with nature writing. My colleague William Gibson said, “It would be cool if you did something with these Ballardian non-fictions of yours.” 

Interview continues below

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DA: Is that William Gibson of Neuromancer fame?

CB: Yes, he encouraged me. I set out to write science fiction partly for the liberated literary territory it afforded, and for the laboratory of ideas it provided to try to imagine better futures (usually by putting mirrors up to see the worst aspects of the present). 

But in time, I concluded the only way to find the way to a better future is to first reckon with what is going on outside, in our damaged relationship with other life around us. And that deploying that same post-cyberpunk lens in the unlikely genre of nature writing was something fun and interesting to try. 

DA: A large portion of the book is talking about overlooked sublime areas in the city of Austin, the specific sort of sublime you only see at the boundaries of development and nature. Can you talk about that?

CB: I was just looking for real life outside of the suburban Pleasantville of the Des Moines of my childhood and early adulthood. Get me off this fake sidewalk to nowhere. Get me out of the car, get me away from the strip mall. I just want to find something real. 

The sublime you asked about—the “sense of wonder” that is the emotional engine of science fiction—was not to be found in imagined futures or Chesley Bonestell spacescapes, but in the very real rewilded edges of real cities, and the promise of resilience and natural abundance they contain. 

DA: You talk about “edgelands” in the U.S. and the UK. I was curious if in your research you learned anything surprising about how non-Western cultures view these edgelands, places where the city meets undeveloped areas or pockets of undeveloped areas?

CB: I think that many other cultures would, to a large extent, defy the very division that's embodied in the word nature in our language. And equivalent words in most European languages. Nature is this thing that's all around us and we're part of it. 

I’ve learned so much from community organizing with my indigenous neighbors. And as a product of my own language, I can only try to find ways through with the linguistic and cultural tools that I've been raised in to find my way to a similar place. And that's what I'm trying to do with this book. 

DA: Near the end of the book, you talk about the rights of trees. I was wondering whether you read The Overstory by Richard Powers and what you thought of it?

CB: Yeah, I love that book. It tackles a really challenging literary problem, which is how do you write a narrative about non-humans? It's a problem that science fiction writers deal with.

I'm not the kind of science fiction writer who shows up for that particular challenge. I think it's really hard to imagine the point of view of an alien intelligence. 

But I thought a lot in my fiction projects about the landscape as a character, or about nature as a character, or as a presence in the narrative. And I think the way Richard Powers went about making an individual tree, or a group of trees, a central part of the story is just absolutely brilliant. 🌾

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