‘The Dog Stars’ novelist Peter Heller / Remembering rock critic Dave Marsh

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Dave Davies** (0:14)
This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. The Dog Stars, a new film from Ridley Scott starring Jacob Elordi and Josh Brolin, is an apocalyptic drama about two men struggling to survive after a virus wiped out much of the world's population.
Here's a scene from the movie. Elordi is speaking to Brolin's character.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:35)
This world fits you, Bang. Wake up, defend, survive. I think you were ready for 10 years before it hit. You liked this sh-t. I was a f-cking mechanic. When I wasn't doing that, I was kissing my wife.
You're wondering every day how I got so f-cking lucky.

**Dave Davies** (1:21)
The Dog Stars, which opens in theaters next week, is adapted from a novel of the same name by Peter Heller.
Heller knows something about survival himself. He's an experienced outdoorsman and adventure writer who's gone to some pretty remote places and done some pretty dangerous things. He wrote Heller High Water about an expedition to an unfathomably deep river gorge in Tibet.
The Dog Stars was his first novel and became a best seller. His other novels include The River, Celine, The Painter, and his latest, The Orchard. Peter Heller holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop in both fiction and poetry. Let's listen to some of the interview I recorded with Heller in 2012, when The Dog Stars was first published. Well, Peter Heller, welcome to Fresh Air.

**Peter Heller** (2:08)
Thank you for having me.

**Dave Davies** (2:09)
Now, this is your first novel. You've written a lot of nonfiction. Why a novel set in a post-apocalyptic world where civilization has collapsed?

**Peter Heller** (2:21)
Yeah, I'm not sure why. I know why I wanted to write a novel. I've been writing nonfiction for many years. And when you write a nonfiction book, of course, I always know what's going to happen next, and I know what the ending is going to be. And I just didn't want to know what was going to happen next. And so I went to the coffee shop where I write, and I sat down, and I began with the first line. So I didn't even, to tell you the truth, know that it was going to be a post-apocalyptic story when I started.

**Dave Davies** (2:49)
Wow. The first line is, I keep the beast running. The beast refers to an old Cessna aircraft. That's how you started?

**Peter Heller** (2:57)
Yeah. And I mean, I know that this stuff about the unraveling of the ecosphere and the apocalypse is something that I've been thinking about a lot. I write a lot about environmental issues and I have a dear friend.
He's a paleobotanist and what he does is look at 70 million year old fossil leaves. And his specialty is the KT boundary. That's the geologic layer that represents the time between when there were a lot of dinosaurs and then when there weren't any. So the sky Kirk is an aficionado of extinction, you might say. And we eat breakfast now and then. And we always talk about this sixth great mass extinction that we're in the middle of right now that scientists are talking about a lot. And we always end up imagining what it'll be like when that apocalypse, this unraveling, begins to affect human society and what it'll look like. And so those themes have been on my mind. And so when I sat down to write, I think, I know they had to be central to the book.

**Dave Davies** (4:06)
You know, I had my own notion about this, which is that, you know, as I read about what you've done, I mean, you've been quite an outdoorsman. You've been, you know, an expedition kayaker. You've gone to some incredibly remote and sometimes dangerous places. And I wondered if you were at times in places where it might have felt like you were one of the last people on Earth.

**Peter Heller** (4:27)
Oh, yeah. You know, that's a wonder. I hadn't thought of it that way. But I was thinking this morning about, sometimes I just, the wonderful thing about, you know, traveling to these places and taking these expeditions is you have these memories and these images that sort of, you know, they form your interior landscape and you can come back to them. And this morning, I was thinking about the Sangpo Gorge in eastern Tibet. And, you know, it's like the deepest gorge in the world. It's right in the middle of the high Himalayas. And it's so deep that it's subtropical. And there are tigers in there and, you know, four species of leopards and 200 species of counting of Rhododendrons.