Literary Titan, which wrote an editorial review for Over Brooklyn Hills, also interviewed me about the book. I’m running it here in full, liking what the questions got me thinking about the book. I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes a novel climate fiction, and you’ll see this fixation throughout the interview.

Also, remember please that you can buy the latest title in The Steep Climes Quartet from many places, including through your local bookstore using Bookshop.org or by simply asking your favorite bookseller to order Over Brooklyn Hills. Or Amazon, too, Kindle or paperback. Or ePub format.

An Everyman

Over Brooklyn Hills follows a seventy-year-old man whose struggles with the painful realities of climate change parallel larger threats involving fossil fuel interests and a climate terrorist group. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

Several things bother me about a lot of climate fiction, and one is that while climate change is an actual existential threat to the social and economic well-being of humans and our biosphere, climate fiction often puts climate change to be upfront acutely. Today—and into the near future—the danger of climate change is less on a human scale than most other of life’s challenges. Much of climate fiction has some apocalyptic quality to the story or presents a main character who is a climate scientist or activist trying to correct a wrong. Unfortunately, such approaches can fail to help readers identify with the issue of climate change within their own lives. Without such identification, the issue of climate change is more likely to remain abstract and all the more easily ignored.

One of the important threads in my writing of fiction and poetry is to make the attempt to capture characters’ feelings as they respond to circumstances. I love to write full-on action and plot-driven parts of stories too, but both as a reader and as a writer, I find that characters without some interiority seem only pawns in the puzzle master’s play, and no matter how compelling or cleverly built the plot may be, the story will feel empty. Raymond Chandler, as much as he’s pointed to as a master of private investigation pulp fiction, is a wonderful and effective writer because the reader gets to know Philip Marlowe, whether by actual reflection by the character, the way the character describes the world around him (including the famously odd and wonderful similes), or how he interacts with other characters.

Why did you want to tell this story through the perspective of Davin Caine at this stage of his life?

Davin Caine is something of an everyman—neither hero nor villain, not a genius with special knowledge nor someone lacking curiosity. Caine, like many other characters in the book, knows about climate change, but like most everyone else, his priorities are the bills to pay, work, friends, family, the next house repair….

By the time of the action of Over Brooklyn Hills in 2035, Caine is seeing a lot of change with the climate crisis and has gotten more involved. Climate migration—writ small and large—is one of the themes.

At the start of the series (in Kill Well, taking place in 2026), Caine is still recovering from a divorce, is worried about paying bills and the cost of energy, and is ambivalent about his paying job. All the chaos of the Trump regime overwhelms him. He’s frustrated that he can’t get into his art studio, and anxious, basically, about everything. Caine feels isolated, just like most people living in our culture today. One of the themes in this book is the difficulty of grasping in our daily lives the import of climate change; another theme is the malfeasance of entrenched interests such as the fossil fuel corporations and the countervailing forces obscuring, delaying, and denying climate action. Well, the malfeasance of moneyed interests and danger of income inequality carry throughout the series.

In Dear Josephine (which takes place in 2029), the climate situation worsens, but progress has a glimmer of hope in the U.S., post-2028 elections. Still, Caine and most everyone else tend to focus on mundane everyday concerns, but the climate crisis keeps creeping in, and acutely so with Hurricane Josephine. I didn’t want the hurricane to be experienced directly—that’s not how most of us would experience it. Caine is in the Berkshires, and the perspective on the hurricane is mediated by the news and by distance. A major theme is how climate change affects us, including economically, even when the consequence is not direct. Another theme is the previously referenced malfeasance, but in this book, the readers see bad actors emerging from different sides: pro-climate, pro-economic justice, and the big money interests.

As I age, I find myself interested in how aging fits into climate fiction, so Caine is set up to show us these effects. Farm to Me, the last book of the series and set in 2047, has Caine at 82. There’s plenty of climate progress, but the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the years before maintain a changing climate. There’s a distinct focus on young persons’ climate change struggles, in part contrasting with what we see with Caine.

I don’t think you can talk about climate change effectively without including it in daily lives.

Do you think fiction can help readers grapple with issues that often become polarized in public debate?

I believe so, but I can’t claim to know this. There have been some studies on the efficacy of climate fiction to get readers involved, but those studies are thin—small sample sizes—and there’s the lack of consideration in them about the characteristics of the specific climate fiction used in the studies. One easy conclusion? Apocalypse and dystopia may have the tendency to discourage people from acting, but I’m pretty sure there’s no need for a Ph.D. for this finding.

The biggest need for public action is to end the social silence suppressing conversations about climate change. In the U.S., nearly three-quarters of the population think climate change is a serious problem, but only something like 20 percent talk to others about it. Can the right fiction help encourage conversations? I hope so. Is my work that kind of climate fiction? I hope so, but this question can only be answered by readers. Climate change is a big problem, and big problems get addressed legislatively. Conversation is oxygen for political metabolisms.

One of the reasons why I pursued the topic of climate change through a series is to provide a sort of longitudinal study across the next two decades. Restricting the series through characters to the Berkshires helps, I hope, to keep the reader thinking about their own everyday lives in relation to climate change. The fact is that here in the developed nations, we aren’t on the verge of climate change-instigated societal collapse, even if the energy systems we’re participating in are laying the groundwork for longer-term problems that make the world a harder place for people to thrive.

What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available?

I’m at work on Food to Me, which is the last book in The Steep Climes Quartet. I expect a Spring 2027 publication date. In this last book, food production is a theme, as is the consequence that the young will suffer. Like the other books in the series, there are thriller elements, although none of the books are simply thrillers, which is why I describe the series as “literary climate fiction.”