Deb Olin Unferth, "Earth 7" (Graywolf Press 2026)

Summary

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Podcast Summary: New Books Network — Deb Olin Unferth on Earth 7

Host: G.P. Gottlieb
Guest: Deb Olin Unferth
Episode Date: June 9, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode features Deb Olin Unferth discussing her new apocalyptic novel, Earth 7 (Graywolf Press, 2026), with host G.P. Gottlieb. The conversation delves into the world-building of the novel: a not-too-distant future where Earth is devastated not by cataclysm, but by human neglect and the cumulative impact of technological “band-aids.” Unferth explores themes of environmental collapse, social isolation, and the essential, fragile nature of life. The episode also covers Unferth’s research expeditions, the book’s characters, the interplay of humor and horror, and hints at the deeper mysteries within the novel.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Inspiration for Earth 7

Timestamps: 02:50–04:11

• Origins: Unferth was inspired by technological fixes proposed for climate change (e.g., carbon capture, artificial reefs, scattering sulfur in the sky).
  • “I just started reading about all these very strange things that we are about to do to our planet or are already in the process of doing. And I... I started to get kind of nervous and I started to think some of them were really funny and I started to think that humans are very strange and I began imagining this world.” (Deb Olin Unferth, 02:55)

The Role of Research & Extreme Environments

Timestamps: 04:11–06:19

• Research Expeditions: Unferth and writer Lucy Corin undertook self-designed residencies (Morocco, the Arctic, searching for darkness) that directly informed her writing.
  • “Each one and accompanying all of them, I read a lot... about darkness, about sand, about ice, about glaciers and polar bears. And so as a result, I feel like these very extreme landscapes entered, filtered into the book.” (Deb Olin Unferth, 04:25)
• Darkest Spot: The “darkest place” was found a couple hours from Joshua Tree, in the Nevada desert.

Catastrophe by Neglect (Not by War)

Timestamps: 06:19–08:38

• The devastation in Earth 7 arises not from war but from “human inattention and laziness”: plastics, depletion of forests, lack of planetary stewardship.
  • “It’s only very recently that humans have imagined ruining the Earth ourselves... Now the dominant narrative is becoming, in this part of the century, that we’re just going to destroy it ourselves—just by our forever plastics, by fracking... and all the different elements of climate change.” (Deb Olin Unferth, 06:31)
• Literary reference: Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles as an early work dealing with apocalyptic themes.

Setting: Life in Oceanic Pods

Timestamps: 08:38–09:56

• Geography: Rosemary and her daughter Dylan live in a pod on a continental shelf, not the deep sea—chosen for sensory effect (sand drifting by).
  • “I just wanted to feel that movement. And I think I do have in there just the sense of... Dylan and Rosemary, sitting and staring out the window in the sand, just sleeping by them.” (Deb Olin Unferth, 08:51)

Parenting, Isolation, and Social Breakdown

Timestamps: 09:56–13:09

• Rosemary as Parent: She is a scientist, not a naturally nurturing mother, more invested in research and survival than traditional child-rearing.
  • “Rosemary was not a natural mother... she is also very invested in preserving life on the planet, which is a part of her research, and that includes having a child.” (Deb Olin Unferth, 10:23)
• Solitude: As pod life grows bleak and neighbors depart, Rosemary’s comfort with isolation persists, even as Dylan longs for more.
  • “She doesn’t really seem to need other people. And even though her daughter is expressing the desire to leave, Rosemary is just not interested.” (Deb Olin Unferth, 11:57)

Dylan’s Pen Pal and Martian Salvage

Timestamps: 13:09–15:38

• Dylan’s Connection: Dylan becomes pen pals with a Martian—a descendant of those who fled Earth—visiting via spaceship.
• Martian Salvage: Martians visit Earth to collect “souvenirs” (old books, prom dresses, keyboards): a darkly comic metaphor for planetary abandonment.
  • “They want prom dresses and sofas, and they want old books... just anything that humans used on planet Earth. They just want it the way that we might go to the seashore and just, like, collect any shells that we can find.” (Deb Olin Unferth, 13:15)
  • “You just see this... transfer of human detritus moving across the solar system from Earth to Mars and then into, like, a dump on Mars.” (Deb Olin Unferth, 15:15)

The Character of Melanie

Timestamps: 16:35–18:01

• Introduction: Dylan falls in love with Melanie, whom everyone assumes is a robot due to extreme cosmetic enhancements.
  • “She’s had so much plastic surgery and other kinds of interventions that the people around her... think that she’s a robot.” (Deb Olin Unferth, 16:40)
• Love & Difference: Their relationship is fraught with complications—physical, psychological, planetary.

Preserving DNA – Secret Projects

Timestamps: 18:01–19:41

• Dylan’s Secret: Dylan continues her mother’s work, covertly safeguarding DNA samples—echoing real-world seed banks and conservation facilities.
  • “There are so many of these projects now... they call them seed banks, or... animal arks... And in real life, a lot of those are secret.” (Deb Olin Unferth, 18:07)

The Meaning of “Earth 7”

Timestamps: 19:41–20:14

• Unferth coyly withholds a full explanation, as it’s a major plot point revealed later in the novel.
  • “What Earth 7 is, is a big question in the book that sort of unfolds over the course of the book... you find out... more than halfway through.” (Deb Olin Unferth, 19:56)

Artificial Leisure – The Vacation Land

Timestamps: 20:14–22:27

• Faux paradise: Dylan’s vacation takes her to a simulacrum of a resort—fake sand, fake sky, fake ocean—all designed for the privileged yet not quite the ultra-rich.
  • “A lot of it is VR, virtual reality. Everything has been, like, terraformed... They’ve created, like, a sky that looks blue, created sunsets full of color... I tried to get pretty playful with it.” (Deb Olin Unferth, 20:33)

What’s Next for Deb Olin Unferth?

Timestamps: 22:27–22:57

• After essays and finishing Earth 7, Unferth looks ahead to starting a new novel.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On imagining the apocalypse:
  “Now the dominant narrative is becoming... that we’re just going to destroy [the earth] ourselves, just by our forever plastics, by fracking... mass extinction that we are causing, and all the different elements of climate change.” (Deb Olin Unferth, 06:31)

• How Martians view Earth:
  “They want anything that humans used on planet Earth. They just want it the way that we might go to the seashore and just, like, collect any shells that we can find. And we’re distraught when we’re like, oh, my God, where did all the shells go? Because we took them all.” (Deb Olin Unferth, 13:15)

• On human adaptation and privilege:
  “Is it going to be terrible for everyone? And then I was like, no, absolutely not. Humans are going to keep themselves comfortable for whoever can afford it.” (Deb Olin Unferth, 20:33)

• On preservation and secrecy:
  “In my book I have different kinds of terrorists who come along and are trying to destroy these [DNA banks]. And so, yeah, so it’s a secret. And in real life, a lot of those are secret.” (Deb Olin Unferth, 18:07)

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Key Episode Timestamps

• 02:50 – Unferth on technological "band-aids" and inspiration for Earth 7
• 04:25 – Research with Lucy Corin and impact on the novel
• 06:31 – Human-caused apocalypse vs. older narratives
• 08:51 – Importance of the ocean shelf setting
• 10:23 – Rosemary as an unconventional and isolated mother
• 13:15 – The salvage mission from Mars
• 16:40 – The complicated character of Melanie
• 18:07 – Dylan’s secret DNA-preservation project
• 19:56 – The mystery of “Earth 7”
• 20:33 – The illusion of comfort and vacation in a crumbling world
• 22:35 – What’s next for Unferth

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Tone & Style

The conversation is thoughtful yet laced with dark, dry humor—reflecting both Unferth’s and Gottlieb’s literary sensibilities. The dystopian vision is presented with a certain matter-of-factness, grounded in real-world scientific anxieties, personal experience, and a fascination with human absurdity.

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For listeners or readers intrigued by speculative fiction grounded in contemporary environmental fears, Deb Olin Unferth’s Earth 7 offers a blend of biting satire, somber observation, and inventive world-building—recapped vividly in this engaging author interview.

Transcript

[Deb Olin Unferth]

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[G.P. Gottlieb]

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[Deb Olin Unferth]

So good, so good, so good.

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[Deb Olin Unferth]

welcome to the

[G.P. Gottlieb]

New Books Network in those years the sky was full of sulfur and diamonds shot into the air by cannons to scatter the sunlight. The population of Earth had been falling for decades and the drop did not have a sole cause. And Rosemary was leaving. She was taking her child with her, of course. The child was 5, had a grave face and a funny little march and could have become anyone at that point, her mind still plastic and watery. This is GP Gottlieb, host for New Books and Literature, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. And today I'm talking to Deb Olin Unferth about Earth seven, a novel. The Earth has been basically ruined and humanity is struggling to manage. Rosemary, a scientist opts to take her five year old daughter to live in a pod beneath the ocean. Dylan grows up alone with her mother and cannot wait to leave. But when she finally does, she's not used to being around people. Intrigued by the vast quantities of sand, she becomes a groundskeeper and begins to discover microscopic bits of life in the sand. This is an apocalyptic novel that focuses on searching for life in the universe, the fragility of human existence, and what might happen if we abnegate our responsibility for caring for the planet. Hi Deb, thanks for joining me today.

[Deb Olin Unferth]

Hi, it's so great to be here.

[G.P. Gottlieb]

Thanks so what was your impetus for writing Earth 7?

[Deb Olin Unferth]

So I think that it started when I began reading about all the different kinds of technological band aids that we are inventing and experiencing to try to keep civilization running during climate change. Things like carbon capture and solar arrays. And you know, there's all of these ideas to do things like scatter sulfur in the sky to block the sunlight, or things like ways to create reefs underwater artificially with little robots too, because. Because underwater reefs absorb a lot of carbon. So I just started reading about all these very strange things that we are about to do to our planet or are already in the process of doing. And I don't know, I started to get kind of nervous and I started to think some of them were really funny and I started to think that humans are very strange and I began imagining this world.

[G.P. Gottlieb]

You write in your bio that you've gone on amazing expeditions with a friend to study sand, darkness and ice, all of which show up in some place in your novel. How did your research help in writing this book?

[Deb Olin Unferth]

Yeah, my good friend Lucy Corin and I began doing these little mini self designed residencies and we've done a bunch of them over the years and we did, yeah, we, we just started doing kind of bigger and bigger ones. We went once to the Sahara. Well, we went to Morocco for about a month. We both managed to get the time off of the university where we teach. And then we went to the Arctic on this artist residency program that we had to apply for. And so we've done a few things like this. We went on another one in search of the darkest place that we could find in the United States so that we could see the stars and just feel the darkness around us. And yeah, each one and accompanying all of them, I read a lot. I read a lot of books about darkness, about sand, about, about ice, about glaciers and polar bears. And. And so as a result, I feel like these very extreme landscapes entered filtered into the book. I didn't quite set out to do that, but then just sort of slowly over time, the book became more and more informed by, especially the research I was doing into sand was the darkest

[G.P. Gottlieb]

place in the country. In Texas?

[Deb Olin Unferth]

No, it was about a couple of hours from Joshua Tree. I mean, that was the one we found. And yeah, like just, you know, way out sort of in the Nevada desert.

[G.P. Gottlieb]

So the world of Earth 7 doesn't seem to have been destroyed by war, but by human inattention and laziness in overusing plastics, not preserving trees, et cetera. Can you say more?

[Deb Olin Unferth]

Yeah, it's really interesting all the different ways that humans have imagined the end of Earth that, you know, in the various kinds of apocalypses that we have met, like, you know, it's only very recently that humans have imagined ruining the Earth ourselves. Not that long ago, it was that the gods were going to come and wipe us out, or a God was going to come and wipe us out and drowned us or. Or smite us from the Earth and was only really, I don't know, like, maybe in, like the 1930s or something, that we imagined that we were going to destroy it, that that became the dominant narrative, that we were going to destroy ourselves. And. And I feel like the atom bomb, you know, nuclear war, was a very dominant narrative. I just finished reading a book that I really should have read a long time ago, which was Ray Barrett, Ray Bradbury's the Martian Chronicles, which I really loved. And I know it's so good, I can't believe I didn't read that as a kid. And that one is, the dominant narrative is nuclear war, that nuclear war is going to destroy the planet and everyone's going to have to flee to Mars. And once they get to Mars, they're going to be so sad about Earth that they're just going to want to go back to Earth and try to find their family members. And so again, I think that now the dominant narrative is becoming, in this part of the century, that we're just going to destroy it ourselves just by our forever plastics, by fracking, by, you know, just all of the different ways that we're destroying the planet, mass extinction that we are causing, and all the different elements of climate change. And. Yeah, and so that's. That was the premise that I. That I went with. And probably in both of our lifetimes, when we were kids, that was not the dominant narrative, and now it is becoming one. And I was really interested in exploring that.

[G.P. Gottlieb]

So we meet Rosemary after she moves into her pod, set on an ocean shelf in a community of pods. But do we know where she is exactly? Do you have an idea where that shelf might be located?

[Deb Olin Unferth]

I mean, not really. I mean, I imagined an ocean shelf, not the very bottom of the ocean, because I wanted the sense of sand, like sweeping off of the. Off of the continents, down into the water, sweeping past them on the shelf and then falling into the bottom of the ocean. I just wanted to feel that movement. And I think I do have in there just the sense of the main. The two characters, Dylan and Rosemary, sitting and staring out the window in the sand, just sleeping by them. So I didn't have, you know, I looked at a globe. I have a globe that sort of shows where the shelves are. And some shelves go really far out. Some are just like, really hug the continent. So I just imagine to shelf probably when it's a little bit longer, a little bit wider, so that they really feel like it takes a long time to reach the shore.

[G.P. Gottlieb]

Yeah. The story takes place, obviously in the future, but Rosemary prefers to be alone. And I'm wondering, hasn't humanity learned by that point about a child's need for companionship and socialization because she's raising her tiny child? And why does society. Why. Why has society broken down too much to worry about the psychological growth of one child?

[Deb Olin Unferth]

I mean, so Rosemary is kind of a strange person. In the very beginning of the book, there is someone who she's working for who's kind of saying, do you really think that's the best. You know, is that really the best idea to bring a child down there? And, you know, you could always come back up or whatever. So there. There is sort of a question about whether or not that's a great idea. But Rosemary is a scientist. Rosemary was not a natural mother. She's not like a very big caretaker. She is very invested in her research and. And, yeah, and, you know, she. She is also very invested in preserving life on the planet, which is a part of her research, and that includes having a child. So she does her job. She has the child, and now she has to take care of this child. And she hasn't really given. It's. I don't think that. I don't think that giving a ton of thought to, like, like contemporary or contemporary for the time, ideas about, like, what good parenting is or looks like. I don't. I don't think she gives a whole lot of thought to that.

[G.P. Gottlieb]

Then you have her raising. They're on this shelf in the ocean, but they have neighbors, also people in pods for some amount of time. So that Dylan has a little bit of socialization. She's not very good at it. And then everybody leaves. Why does everybody leave? And why do they. Why does Rosemary stay?

[Deb Olin Unferth]

I think that people start leaving because they realize that it's no fun to live in a. A pod at the bottom of the ocean or on an ocean shelf. And I think that when they first turned the pods into that, when they first started selling the pods for that purpose, I think people were really excited and it sounded like fun. They were faced with the solitude, the difficulty of even just getting from pod to podcast. Um, it became very depressing, and they start leaving. I mean, this all happens in, like, the first chapter of the book or the second chapter of the book. And by the end of the second chapter of the book, they. They're mostly leaving. And. And Rosemary, you know, she's just a little bit of a stunted person, and she doesn't really seem to need other people. And even though her daughter is expressing the desire to leave, Rosemary is just not interested.

[G.P. Gottlieb]

Yep. Can you introduce Dylan's pen pal?

[Deb Olin Unferth]

So Dylan is such a wily little teenager. She figures out how to use the technology really quickly, and she starts contacting any. She starts looking at other conversations that are going on all over the planet. And she contacts someone who is in a spaceship who is in the atmosphere and is visiting from Mars. And the Martian she contacts is someone who is a descendant of. Of the original people who left the planet, the original humans who left the planet to create a colony on Mars. And that was, like, a few generations ago. And so, yeah, so he's living up there, having his Martian life, and he comes to Earth, and you find out later that he's part of a salvage team, a team that has come to back to Earth from Mars to try to just collect all the detritus that's all over the planet. Because Martians really want souvenirs of Earth. They want prom dresses and sofas, and they want old books, and they just want anything, old keyboards and pictures, paintings, just anything that humans used on planet Earth. They just want it the way that we might go to the seashore and just, like, collect any shells that we can find. And we're distraught when we're like, oh, my God, where did all the shells go? Because we took them all. There's none left. And so this is what the Martians are doing, and they're just bringing all this junk back to Mars. And it's, you know, the humans who are now Martians having been born on Mars, they use it for a little while and they just throw it away. And so you just see this big. This, like the. This transfer of, like, human detritus moving across the solar system from Earth to Mars and then into, like, a dump on Mars. So, yeah, that's what's happening.

[G.P. Gottlieb]

A little bit of humor there, but it's, you know, in one sense, it's not that funny, but okay.

[Deb Olin Unferth]

When we need. Yeah, completely.

[G.P. Gottlieb]

Right.

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[G.P. Gottlieb]

When we meet Melanie, we think she's a robot. Can you talk about her?

[Deb Olin Unferth]

Yeah. So Melanie is someone who Dylan falls in love with. She's had so much plastic surgery and other kinds of. Of interventions done that the people around her at first think that she's a robot. I mean, that was kind of the conceit of her character. You pretty that she's not a robot and you figure out that she had her own, you know, she, she has a very full, rich story that, you know, sort of how she ended up in this situation, why she has all of this stuff put in her and all these changes made to her body and, you know, and like, what she's going to do about it going forward. And yeah, they fall in love. And the big question is how are they ever going to be able to live together? I mean, they're so different and the planet is so desolate and there's so many problems. There's so many things in their way. And Dylan has a project that she needs to be working on and she can't work on it where Melanie is. So, yeah, it becomes a.

[G.P. Gottlieb]

Let's talk about that project. Why does Dylan need to keep it secret? What's the point?

[Deb Olin Unferth]

So Dylan. Dylan has adopted the project of her mother's, which is to preserve life in DNA. And you know, the thing is, I was inspired to do it because there are so many of these projects now. They call them like seed banks or they call them, you know, animal arks or we have all different kinds of words for it. And they're all over the planet and they're spread out so that if there's any kind of disaster like a nuclear war or terrorism of some kind of different pieces of it will be preserved. And there's duplicates of them in different places. And I was so interested in that and so I put that into my book and I did a lot of research into what they look like and, you know, where they are and things like that. What. What is being preserved? And so in my book, I, I kind of, I do, I kind of duplicate the sorts of things that really exist out there. And, and in my book I have different kinds of terrorists who come along and are trying to destroy these. And so, yeah, so it's a secret. And in real life, a lot of those are secret. Some of them are like, you can find out what's in them and stuff, but it's very hard to find out exactly where they are. Right. And yeah, so I just kind of imitated what actually exists in the world and what we're moving toward even more.

[G.P. Gottlieb]

This would be a good place for you to explain the title. What does Earth 7 refer to?

[Deb Olin Unferth]

So I don't know. Do I really want to explain the whole book? I. I guess I can. I don't, I don't know if I want to give away everything.

[G.P. Gottlieb]

No, no, no.

[Deb Olin Unferth]

That, like, what Earth 7 is, is a big question in the book that sort of unfolds over the course of the book. And I think you find out, like, maybe, like definitely more than halfway through, you find out what Earth7 is and why it's important.

[G.P. Gottlieb]

Right. Okay, that's a good. That's a good enough explanation. When Dylan goes on her one vacation, we learned that the entire place is fake, including the sand. Can you talk about that a bit? And is it the case that the world is crumbling but people need to have a vacation spot?

[Deb Olin Unferth]

Yeah, you know, I mean, I thought a lot about what the world is going to be looking like as we move toward increased extreme climate. And I thought about, like, is it going to be terrible for everyone? And then I was like, no, absolutely not. Like, humans are going to keep themselves comfortable for whoever can afford it. And so I just imagine like, what will it look like? What will it look like? Not for the people who are like billionaires who can afford to just, you know, create their own space that you can't, you know, that you. That no one can get into. But what about like the upper middle class? What is theirs going to look like? And so I came up with this idea of a vacation land, A place you can go on vacation where that's fairly high end, but not that high end. Like you can see the holes. So it's A lot of it is VR virtual reality. Everything has been like terraformed. Like they've trucked in sand, which is something that we already do. And beaches all over the, all over the world. And they have created like, they've created a sky that looks blue, they've created sunsets that are full of color. They've created ocean that is that reflects the blue sky. They've just, they've done all of these different things to make this place look like an old fashioned resort. And yeah, I had a lot of fun creating it and I tried to get pretty playful with it. Yeah.

[G.P. Gottlieb]

Now that Earth 7 has been launched, by the time this comes out, it will be launched. What are you working on next?

[Deb Olin Unferth]

So I think that I'm probably going to write another novel. I've been writing a bunch of different short essays and stuff lately, and now that this book is finished and off my table, I think I can finally settle down to my next that sounds good.

[G.P. Gottlieb]

Thank you so much for joining me today, Deb. It's been a pleasure talking about your new novel, Earth seven.

[Deb Olin Unferth]

Thank you so much, Galit. I really appreciate it. It was a lot of fun.

[G.P. Gottlieb]

And thank you for joining me again. This is G.P. gottlieb, author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery series and host for New Books and Literature, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. Today I've been chatting with Deb Olin Unferth about her dystopian novel Earth 7. Hope you all have something out of this world to read today. And always happy reading.

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[Deb Olin Unferth]

Edu Sci.