Naturally, after reading several tomes about our worsening environmental predicament -- and finding himself utterly depressed and horrified -- Boyle didn't go downtown in a white robe to tell passersby the end is near. Instead, he used his timber-size sense of humor to pen his brand-new fiction, "A Friend of the Earth."

Boyle laughs often, even while we discuss environmental degradation. But he also tends to fix on me a dead-on, apocalyptic stare (look at the book jacket photos) as soon as he finishes answering a question. Not only does the chilling look signal the termination of an answer, it resonates with its own interrogation: "These issues I'm examining within myself, what kind of thought have you given them? Where are your moral boundaries fixed?"

"A Friend of the Earth" is set partially in the future, yet there are only a few cyberpunk trappings. Did you consciously try to stay away from something like that?

I did purposefully stay away from talking about technological advances much in this book, because I'm not a sci-fi guy. I've never read any sci-fi. I'm more interested in creating a kind of literary, satirical future -- like, maybe, if Jonathan Swift were around, he'd do something like this.

So the machine part of it didn't interest me much, except the sorts of machines in the '80s and '90s that we had, like the feller buncher and so on that we use specifically in logging. I'm much more interested in going back to nature. Is that possible?

Maybe I'll think about machines in another novel. In my basement lab I'm always working on technological advances -- like the automobile. You know the parking situation? You know the little "blippo" you have to lock your car? I've designed one now where you "blip" it and the car immediately shrinks to the size of a wallet. The technological glitch is, it's a really heavy wallet. So I'm working on it still.

Do you see any hope for us collectively as a species?

Not a single breath of hope. No. And this is an informed opinion because, by the way, I've read all the environmental tracts. And boy, that's why the public doesn't want to know about it, because it is so bleak. I can't find any hope in anything anybody's writing about the environment, and they're all trying to tell us cautionary tales, too. But as Ty Tierwater says in this book, "I'm not preaching. It's too late for that."

And I really, truly believe that it's the population pressure that's killing us -- no matter what we do. We've made tremendous advances in a higher consciousness of the environment in the last 30 years or so, since Earth Day, since [ecologist and writer] Rachel Carson. We recycle, we try to turn the lights off, all of that. But I think it's way too late to have any impact on a world with 6 billion people. And so I feel guilty about eating, breathing, drinking water, turning on a light -- so does everybody else. The only thing I can think to do about it is make fun of it.

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