Writing near-future stories can go wrong quickly, but at times I look clairvoyant, too.

“They wanted to hold Exxon accountable. Then they got hacked.” This is the headline of recent Grist story, one published in partnership with The Guardian.

Gosh darn it, but I couldn’t be more pleased.

I’m not happy about the malfeasance of the dirty rotten oil corporation—that the article suggests, with excellent circumstantial evidence, may be Exxon Mobil—which hired a PR firm, which hired a hack-forward middle man, who hired actual hackers to get into accounts of various climate activists and organizations attempting to sue Exxon Mobil, as the reporting says, to hold the companies “accountable for climate change.” The story continues:

A few months earlier, a set of explosive media reports had revealed that the company’s own scientists determined as early as 1982 that the extraction and burning of fossil fuels caused climate change — but Exxon went on to fund climate denial campaigns anyway.

That part of the story is by now well known, at least in climate activism circles, not that there’s been many legal victories over the last ten years. I’m certainly not happy about that.

Why I’m suppressing a grin is that this news hits as Over Brooklyn Hills, Book Three of The Steep Climes Quartet, is released into the wild. What’s wild for me is that one of the plot threads involves a huge hacking operation to destroy the electronic records of legal documents for about 150 different lawsuits against various fossil fuel corporations and associates, regulatory agency heads, and retired politicians. The substance of any of the lawsuits is not detailed in the book, but one of the through-characters of the series, Jimmy, now approaching middle age in 2035, is the IT lead at NoNolo, which is a legal document clearinghouse used by many of the legal teams involved in these court cases. This plotline is not central to the story, exactly, but one of several that present different aspects of the world fighting against climate change and the often banal evil that fossil fuel businesses cavalierly undertake.

My prediction reflected in this plot point is that the suits against the fossil fuel corporations—many underway already—will take a long time to wind through the legal system. That itself is not a prediction so much as a conclusion based on the historic record of civil lawsuits against big companies. The lawsuits against Johnson & Johnson, for talc and asbestos contamination of baby powder, started in 2009 and the reckoning continues to this day. (There are some very striking similarities between this case and the cases being brought—or attempted to be brought, anyway—against Big Oil.)

The third book’s prediction is that major and minor cases alike will finally get their proverbial day in court by the mid-2030s, with the Supreme Court largely rectified by a run of Democratic Party-dominated administrations and public sentiment having grown angry at fossil fuels and Big Oil’s efforts to keep their business not only relevant, but future-proof.

There are all kinds of nefarious deeds some corporations will undertake to protect their fortunes. Since realism is an important element in my fiction series, I’ve done research about corporations’ evil deeds. “Writing Villains on Both Sides in Climate Fiction” is an older post about portraying villains, although from any side of the aisle. “Murder, Oil, and Blood Money: Is the climate fiction plot line of fossil fuel interests murdering someone far-fetched?” looks at some research I undertook about what we know and suspect about businesses going bad, and what I found was unsettling, but at least my findings made the various villains in my series plausible. Fossil fuel corporations do have blood on their hands, although the vast majority of fossil fuel-related deaths come not from the barrel of a gun, but a barrel of oil.

The Odd and Twisty Road for the Series and Great Forecasts—or Not!

Dear Josephine, Book Two of The Steep Climes Quartet, was on track to publish in Fall 2024, and I’d assumed the Democrats wouldn’t lose to Trump, so, so much for my “Carnac the Magnificent” shtick (look it up). While the 2024 election was disastrous for climate progress in the U.S., it was bad for me because  I had to extensively revise the first book to reflect Trump’s ascendency. Since Dear Josephine is set in 2029, this book too needed revision, so a longer delay for publication since I first revised Kill Well, the first book published in 2023, but set in 2026.

Arrrgh.

Another weird set of coincidences in the second book’s storylines that would have seemed predictive if Dear Josephine had published on its original schedule, was that in Dear Josephine there was a massive hurricane, and in the real-world Hurricane Helene’s shocking damages came and went in 2024 as I revised the once-thought-finished manuscript. Dear Josephine also contained a character targeting Fortune 400 individuals with the hope of starting a movement grandiosely named Kill the Rich, so imagine my surprise when Brian Thompson, president of United Healthcare was shot, allegedly by Luigi Mangione.

My pique at Dear Josephine’s delayed publication until after these events is not my most admirable trait, nor my fantasies of being interviewed by the news because I had “anticipated” such events.

I would have loved the bump in book sales though.

No Predictions, Really

But really, I’m not clairvoyant nor have the gift of second sight, but rather I’ve just been following the zeitgeist. I’m not surprised to see such fictional stories come to life in the real world. We can expect stronger hurricanes to hit large population centers. We can expect the shame of wealth inequality to manifest in angry reactions. We can expect more and worse extreme weather, mounting economic stresses on households, growing incidents of chronic lung problems from wildfires and fossil fuel pollution, fiercer social discord from fraying public nerves and fears about the future, shocking food production problems from droughts, and mounting deaths from heatwaves. That’s not prediction, it is science and all too reasonable extrapolation.

I especially liked the Booklife reviewer’s comment below about Over Brooklyn Hills, because it captures what I’m trying to do with the series, which is to place climate change within the lives of characters who aren’t scientists or IPCC delegates, but regular people:

The cast, led by now-70-year-old artist/journalist Davin Caine, features a beleaguered town manager in a failing marriage; a freelance VR designer sleeping rough on Monument Mountain after Brooklyn becomes too hot; a climate activist building explosive devices for a domestic terror cell; and many more. Guenette… builds a plausible 2035 with a light hand—offshore sea walls, news outlets charging micro-payments, drone deliveries on the Appalachian Trail—and welcome focus on people’s lived experience. 

Too often, climate fiction fails to bridge planetary-scale crisis with human-scale everyday life. Climate fiction should focus on human stories that connect readers directly to our present challenges. Literary Titan’s review reveals this about Over Brooklyn Hills when it says:

I felt less like I was being shown a future world and more like I was being asked to notice the one already forming around us. That’s unsettling. It’s also the book’s strength.

Kirkus Review also noted this focus:

Guenette’s attention to the ways in which climate change may affect communities at the local level makes for a compelling read, and the writing is zippy and clean.

A reviewer on Goodreads may have put this best about how regular people experience climate change:

One of the novel’s greatest strengths is its realism. Rather than depicting climate change as a distant catastrophe, the story explores its gradual but relentless effects on daily life, public policy, migration, housing, infrastructure, and community relationships. This approach makes the future portrayed in the novel feel plausible and deeply relevant.