Mpr News With Kerri Miller

When superstorm Sandy wreaked havoc on Eiren Caffall’s childhood home of New York City, her first thought was: What about the museums? That distressing question provoked her first novel, “All the Water in the World.” In this futuristic dystopia, climate change is unchecked. Cities are drowned, people are adrift. But already, some are thinking of the after by looking to the past. The former curators and researchers at the American Natural History Museum have taken up residence on the museum’s roof, forming a new sort of family and thinking about how to preserve the artifacts still in their power.“Museums are … the repositories of our collective understandings, evidence of discoveries, warehouses of materials that will fuel discoveries in the future,” writes Caffall. “They hold the past in trust for the future.”This week, Caffall joins host Kerri Miller to talk about the hope she wants to see in dystopian fiction. “The narratives we have in the popular culture about what disasters do to people are mostly incorr