As Brown fell in love again - with the artist and architect Agustina Rodriguez - he conceived of a genuinely weird and amazing plan to build a house. A very weird house, in a very weird place. He bought a plot of wasteland that had once housed the head-end of an oil pipeline (connected to a nearby oil-storage facility that poisoned the people who lived near it, in an act of wanton environmental racism) and had been used as a construction-waste dump for years.

7/

After securing an extremely unlikely loan, Brown remediated the plot, excavating the oil pipeline, the building *the most striking home you have ever seen* in the resulting trench. Brown is a pal of mine, and this is where I stay when I'm in Austin, and I can promise you, the pictures don't do it justice:

texasmonthly.com/style/christo…

8/

Formally, *A Natural History of Empty Lots* is a memoir that explains all of this. But not really. Like I say, this is just the *back story*. What *Natural History* really is, is a series of loosely connected essays that explains how everything fits together: colonial conquest, Brown's failed marriage, his experience as a lawyer learning property law, what he learned by mobilizing that learning to help his neighbors defend the pockets of wildness that refuse to budge.

9/

It's an *erudite* book, skipping back through millennia of history, sidewise through the ecology of Texas, all while somehow serving as a kind of spotter's guide to the wild things you can see in Austin - and maybe, in your town - if you know how to look. It's a book about how people change the land, and how the land changes people.

10/

It is filled with pastoral writing that summons Kim Stanley Robinson by way of Thoreau, and it sometimes frames its philosophical points the way a cyberpunk writer would - like Neal Stephenson writing a cyberpunk trilogy that is also the story of Leibniz and Newton fighting over credit for inventing calculus:

memex.craphound.com/2004/11/20…

11/

Brown is a stupendous post-cyberpunk writer, and also a post-cyberpunk *person*, which I've known for sure since I happened upon him one morning, thoughtfully mowing his roof with a scythe:

flickr.com/photos/doctorow/464…

You can get a sense of what that means in this lockdown-era joint presentation that Chris, Bruce Sterling and I did on "cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk":

archive.org/details/asl-cyberp…

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Brown is a spectacular novelist. His ecofascist civil war trilogy that opens with *Tropic of Kansas* got so much right about the politics of American demagoguery and was *perfectly* timed with the Trump presidency:

memex.craphound.com/2017/07/11…

The sequel, *Rule of Capture*, uses the device of courtroom drama in a way that comes uncomfortably close to the Orwell/Kafka mashup that the authorities have created to deal with environmental protesters:

memex.craphound.com/2019/08/12…

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And the final volume, *Failed State*, is one of the most *complicated* complicated utopias you could ask for. This is what people mean by "thrilling conclusion":

pluralistic.net/2020/08/12/fai…

As brilliant as Brown is in fiction mode, his nonfiction is unclassifiably, unforgettably brilliant. *A Natural History of Empty Lots* is the kind of book that challenges how you feel about the crossroads we're at, the place you live, and the place you want to be.

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On September 24th, I'll be speaking in person at the Boston Public Library!

bpl.bibliocommons.com/events/6…

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The paperback edition of The Lost Cause, my nationally bestselling, hopeful solarpunk novel is out this month!

us.macmillan.com/books/9781250…

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