We welcome Roxanne Doty, author of Out Stealing Water, and Amy L. Bernstein, author of The Protero Complex, to our podcast to discuss Writers as Recording Artists: Power and Empathy in Fiction. Novelists writing of their contemporary world are historical commentators of their time. They offer sweeping and sometimes dystopian views of government and the people who run it, tapping into real fears and fundamental truths about the world, its people, its leaders and their policies. Civil unrest, wars, plagues, famines all find their way into literature. Roxanne and Amy have created fictional worlds that touch upon economic power and economic deprivation, upon the scarcity of resources, and the social justice implications of differential access to those resources.