Episode 26: Roy Scranton – “Publishing at the End of the World (No New Kaiju)”

Join us for a heartening discussion of Where It’s All Going and Why There’s Not A Lot of Good Reason to Believe It’s Going to Turn Out Well. Sounds like another publishing conversation, right? Close, but this one’s about the actual end of the world. Which is also publishing, turns out.

Our guest is friend of the pod and beloved apocalypse harbinger Roy Scranton, Associate Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame and Director of the Notre Dame Environmental Humanities Initiative, whose writing you may have encountered in the novels War Porn and I Heart Oklahoma!, such nonfiction books as Learning to Die In The Anthropocene and We’re Doomed, Now What?, and various journals and magazines. This ep is occasioned by Roy’s latest book, Impasse: Climate Change and the Limits of Progress, just out in August 2025 from Stanford University Press, which we find to be a true fount of 21st-century publishing inspo. In the book, Roy takes our magical thinking about ecological collapse and what we think we can do about it to task, questioning progress narratives and arguing for realistic responses in the tradition of Ethical Pessimism. Ethical? Pessimism? Sounds like small press publishing to us! Why make books? Why make books at the end of the world?

Along the way: suffering, time, attention, hope, nihilism, antagonism, the Serenity Prayer, Mary Shelley’s dad, AI, parasites, trolls, Michael Mann, Joseph Tainter, Johannes Göransson and Joyelle McSweeney of Action Books (s/o ep. 9), Matvei Yankelevich (s/o ep. 1), Charles Bukowski and Modest Mouse, crises in our national political discourse and in higher ed, publishing's carbon footprints, three adults trying to figure out what a Wojak is, and other stuff that’s decidedly not for everyone. Buckle up, doomers.