A long review appears on Goodreads recently and, if I do say so myself, this review is yet another that speaks well for the latest The Steep Climes Quartet title, Over Brooklyn Hills.

Here the Goodreads review, by Katie Meyers, just published and in full:

Over Brooklyn Hills is an ambitious and thought provoking installment in The Steep Climes Quartet, offering readers a vivid vision of a near future world grappling with the ongoing realities of climate change. David Guenette skillfully combines environmental, political, and personal narratives to create a story that is both intimate and expansive.

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.

The character of Davin Caine serves as an effective anchor for the narrative. Through his work, creative pursuits, and evolving personal relationships, readers experience the human side of a changing world. His life reflects both the challenges and adaptations required in a society navigating environmental uncertainty.

The heatwave that drives large numbers of people into the Berkshires creates a particularly compelling conflict. The resulting tensions between residents and newcomers highlight issues of scarcity, housing, social cohesion, and community resilience. These local struggles mirror larger global challenges unfolding throughout the novel.

What makes the book especially engaging is its ability to connect personal stories with global developments. Climate migration, geopolitical instability, energy transitions, and environmental activism all intersect within a narrative that remains focused on individual lives and relationships. The result is a novel that feels both expansive in scope and emotionally grounded.

The worldbuilding is detailed and thoughtful, presenting a future shaped not by sudden collapse but by ongoing adaptation, compromise, and conflict. This nuanced perspective distinguishes the novel from more conventional dystopian narratives.

Over Brooklyn Hills, Book Three of The Steep Climes Quartet, is now available. You can find Over Brooklyn Hills—Kindle and paperback—of The Steep Climes Quartet through Amazon, or order it through your favorite bookstore or in ePub format.

Learn more about Over Brooklyn Hills here.

The post Another Review of Over Brooklyn Hills first appeared on David Guenette.

Here’s a quote from the review that captures, I think, what I’m trying to do with the series The Steep climes Quartet:

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.

I’ve been writing a lot about climate fiction and what makes a story or novel climate fiction, and the reviews coming in are helpful articulations of this question. Of course, my pending interview with them will force me to articulate my view on this question of what makes fiction climate fiction.

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.

This review copied below is from Literary Titans, which describes itself as “an organization of professional editors, writers, and professors passionate about the written word. We review fiction and non-fiction books in different genres, conduct author interviews, and recognize talented authors with our monthly Literary Titan Book Award. We are privileged to work with so many creative authors around the world and help them promote their work.” 

With the advent of independent publishing, there’s been a slew of such services, but Literary Titan has managed to be early in and is well regarded. Plus, their review is quite good of my recently published Over Brooklyn Hills, the third book of The Steep climes Quartet, so that speaks well of them, I’d say. Well, of course I would say this, but you can read what they say about my newest book in the four-book series:

Over Brooklyn Hills by David Guenette is a literary climate fiction thriller set in 2035, where climate change is no longer a warning on the horizon but a daily pressure shaping politics, money, migration, housing, violence, and ordinary private life. The story follows Davin Caine, now seventy, as he moves through a Berkshire County strained by rising costs, climate migration, and civic unease, while larger threats involving fossil fuel interests, international tensions, and the climate terrorist group No One is Safe push the novel into darker territory.

Guenette isn’t just interested in disaster as spectacle. He’s interested in the way disaster becomes routine. A hot spell, a housing meeting, a town budget, a person trying to keep a home, a young worker needing air conditioning, a local government trying to respond without losing its soul. These details give the novel its weight. 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.

The writing has a restless, observant quality that I found both engaging and, at times, intentionally uncomfortable. Guenette moves between characters with a wide lens, and his choices make the book feel crowded in the way real life is crowded. Davin’s reflective passages slow the story down in useful ways, giving the thriller elements more moral texture. Then the violence and conspiracy threads cut back in, sharp and ugly, reminding me that this is still a thriller with real stakes. I appreciated that balance. The book doesn’t let anyone stay clean for long, not activists, not politicians, not industries, not regular people trying to get through the week.

I would recommend Over Brooklyn Hills to readers who like climate fiction with a political pulse, especially those who want a thriller that thinks as much as it moves. It will appeal to readers who enjoy near-future stories grounded in realistic social consequences rather than end-of-the-world spectacle. If you like fiction that blends suspense, civic anxiety, personal reflection, and big-picture questions about responsibility, this book has plenty to offer.

Rating: 5

The post Another Editorial Review of Over Brooklyn Hills first appeared on David Guenette.

You can find Over Brooklyn Hills—Kindle and paperback—through Amazon, or order it through your favorite bookstore or in ePub format.

For more information about The Steep Climes Quartet, see “Over Brooklyn Hills, Book Three of The Steep Climes Quartet.”

Booklife Review:

The clear-eyed third entry in Guenette’s near-future series, set in the Berkshires in a 2035 of climate and refugee crises, stands out for Guenette’s singular blend of prognostication, rich characterization, slice-of-life scenecraft, process-oriented thriller elements, and deep interest in activism, journalism, governance, technological shifts, and the surprising ramifications of climate change. Guenette connects horrific global heatwaves to everyday existence around Great Barrington, Mass., which faces an escalating influx of transients, both the usual vacationers and desperate people seeking relief from the heat. In the midst of a housing crisis, the journalists and city administrators in Guenette’s sprawling cast fear—and will face—violence, but much of the novel explores, with keen understanding of interconnected systems, the practical challenges faced by the city, and changemakers on both sides of the law.

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 writes convincing accounts of bomb-making, dealings with cartels, sniper assassinations, life on the run, and even the tracking of dark money political contributions, but the heart of the novel is in his detailed forecast of the world (and weather) to come. He 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.

The novel is structurally ambitious but also diffusive, with many pages giving to rumination. The strongest narrative momentum comes in chapters about Allen Randolph, the bomb-maker, and town manager Fletch, while Davin’s macular degeneration and attraction to his house sharer, Be, inspires the warmest and funniest writing—“Oh, jeez,” he says, when Be presses into him. Threads converge slowly but with intelligence and power. Newcomers will struggle to keep up, but old-hands will be moved as Guenette balances humanity and tension, hope and warning.

Takeaway: Incisive, humane near-future novel of the Berkshires in the climate crisis.

Great for fans of: Julia Glass’s Vigil Harbor, Lauren Groff’s Florida.

Production grades
Cover: B
Design and typography: A
Editing: A-
Marketing copy: A-

The post Booklife Review of Over Brooklyn Hills first appeared on David Guenette.

The Steep Climes Quartet is a literary climate fiction series.

Why “literary”? Because the emphasis is on deeply drawn characters with which readers can identify across the many aspects of their own lives.

Why “climate fiction?” The series’ local characters live in a world with a changing climate across a two-decade-plus timeframe:

• Kill Well takes place in 2026
• Dear Josephine takes place in 2029
• Over Brooklyn Hills takes place in 2035
• Farm to Me takes place in 2047

Is climate a primary concern for the characters? Like most of us today, many of the characters aren’t thinking all that much about climate change. We know about climate change and see that this is a problem, but we mostly go about our quotidian lives focused on work, family, friends, and paying the next bill. But climate change is happening and affecting the whole world, just in different degrees of vulnerability and challenge. We don’t escape its effects entirely now, even in the relatively resource-rich part of the world in which we live.

Here in the developed world—the series’ through characters live in Berkshire County, Massachusetts—climate change remains more abstract: reports in the news, connection to political issues, and cautionary stories about extreme weather, such as droughts, deluges. storms and hurricanes, diseases, and heat. Climate change is a real problem that is catching up with us all, and actions that combat climate change early on—today!—helps reduce the devastating problems later. Within this infosphere that is today’s pervasive static, unsettling studies on the problems and hope-engendering developing solutions leak through. Of course, working toward progress creates ever-shifting forms of opposition from entrenched interests. 

Each book carries one or more specific themes.

In Kill Well, that theme is the malfeasance of the fossil fuel industry that infiltrates every aspect of society, even seeping into quiet places and small towns. There’s a thriller subplot, welcome humor, and a wide range of characters, including a killer for hire. In 2026, most people are aware of climate change, but it remains abstract and far off seeming, and household economic concerns get the greater attention. But people, knowing or not, are already experiencing the fact that climate change is expensive and the re-ascension of Trump itself extracts a cost.

Dear Josephine looks at the carry-over consequences of extreme weather in the form of a massively destructive hurricane that hits Florida’s Gold Coast, devastating Miami. This book imagines the emotional effects of such an event even at remove, while also following a nefarious scheme by monied interests trying to shape an act coming up in post-2028 Congress in order gain control of the potentially staggering large budget, even while American society further frays under the carryover effects Trump, Big Oil, and the billionaires who have become the target for one or more people going around the country, murder list in hand.

Over Brooklyn Hills looks at climate migration, and for Berkshire County it is climate migration writ small as young people from New York City seek relief in the relatively cool hills of the Berkshires from a socked-in urban heatwave, even as on the international stage large-scale climate migrations develop. The main through-character Davin, at 70 years of age, has finally become an active supporter of climate change politics and the proud owner of solar panels and batteries and his membership in a VPP. And then there’s a domestic climate terrorist group in the news; No One is Safe, first introduced in Dear Josephine, now playing a far more dangerous game.

Farm to Me, an in-process manuscript of the 2047 story with a target publication date of Spring 2027, sees a world where rising average global temperatures are changing things consequentially, including food yields, with expanding Northeast farms taking on more agricultural production as Western farmers suffer chronic droughts. There’s a local murder mystery, too, in which the main through character Davin, now 82 and fixating on getting older, finds himself in the middle.

You can find the first three books—Kindle and paperback—of The Steep Climes Quartet through Amazon, or order it through your favorite bookstore or in ePub format.

The post Over Brooklyn Hills is Now Available first appeared on David Guenette.

From the very first sentence she had my interest:

There is a reason so many people can imagine ecological collapse more easily than regenerative economies. A reason burnout feels more believable than collective care. A reason dystopian futures dominate films, books, media narratives and political discourse, while genuinely transformative futures are often dismissed as naive, unrealistic or impossible before they are even fully articulated.

I’m the author of The Steep Climes Quartet, what I call a literary climate fiction series. The definition of “climate fiction” obsesses me, understandably.

Vasileva posits that dystopian literature is ascendant in today’s world because of social conditioning that she refers to as “the colonisation of imagination.” She writes that happens when dominant systems become so embedded in everyday life that their logic starts to feel inseparable from reality itself. Economic systems, technological systems, educational systems and cultural narratives do not only organise institutions. They also shape perception. They influence what people expect from the future, what kinds of change feel achievable, and which possibilities appear serious enough to pursue collectively.

She describes herself in her Substack’s “About” information this way: “I guide people and organizations through transitions. By uncovering the stories and patterns shaping them, I help them let go of what no longer serves, imagine alternatives, and design practices that bring their next chapter to life.” Sounds like intriguing and difficult work.

The colonization of imagination is an interesting concept, and she makes a good argument for this as a factor in our difficulty in imagining different collective futures. A look at much of what falls into climate fiction supports her argument, what with the storylines of desert landscapes, or boundless deadly storms, or flooded worlds where suffering, scarcity, and strife abound. But the answer to this question may be answered far more simply: disaster stories—at least the form most common in the climate fiction literature—are easier to write.

The World is Complicated and so are Social and Economic Relationships

One of my pet peeves is climate fiction stories that imagine futures that are so discordant from today’s world and thus prove difficult to relate to.

I’m a big fan of Grist, and for those of you who don’t know, this organization describes itself as:

…a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to reporting on climate change. Since 1999, we have used the power of journalism to engage the public about the perils of one of the most existential threats we face. We seek to document the often unequal impacts of climate change on communities in the United States and globally—as well as to show the promise of equitable climate solutions.

Supporting Grist makes a lot of sense.

One of the draws I have toward Grist is their ongoing “Imagine 2200” contest, which publishes climate fiction short stories. The last couple stories recently published were both entertaining and provoking. “Forty-Seven Vacant Floors of Ur,” by T. K. Rex, extrapolates San Francisco a few years ahead, when AI has pushed many people in the former high tech land of opportunity into a universal basic income world of homelessness; no grand climate solutions to the climate crisis are offered here, but what’s on tap is an effective human story that makes one think. The other story, “Sandbag Squid,” by Ashlee Lhamon, offers some similarities, including the near-future setting—a recognizable future—and like “Forty-Seven Vacant Floors of Ur,” this story presents the perspective of a single character: “On a cold, damp beach in Louisiana, Henry Block is counting down the days until his Conservation Corps work ends and he can get back to building his digital world.“ Other stories offer more fantastical premises: an android, a spirit in a field, an urban planning group communicating with mycelium. Still, my sense is that Tory Stephens, Grist’s Climate Fiction Creative & Brand Partnerships Manager, who runs the short story contest, has been growing more inclined to real world near-future stories and away from the allegorical or fantasy stories.

Anyway, why do I mention Grist climate fiction, or the work of many writers  on Substack’s Climate Fiction Writers League, and my disappointment with climate fantasy and apocalypse stories? It’s simple: I want to see, by way of a writer’s imagination, how we get to where we need to be in relation to the climate from where we are. You might be interested in checking out a couple other of my posts about climate fiction: “A Fantastic Essay about Climate Fiction but Still a Lot of Fantasy” and “Climate Fiction and Myth in Climate Fiction.”

Simple Climate Fiction versus Complex Climate Fiction

Just to establish a metric, I think of Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future as complex climate fiction. First, the scope of the book is worldwide, and second, the book incorporates a wide range of characters and subjects, including the bureaucratic maneuverings of the United Nations, international monetary policy bodies, and major banks. This book also includes factors like politics and elections, technological developments, glaciology, and throws in a major extreme weather event, along with a climate action terrorist group that grows out of it. The novel begins more or less in the present (albeit pre-Trump the Second) and extends for decades beyond. Some readers don’t care for the book, in part because it delves into things like fiscal policies, but the strength of the book—besides Robinson being an excellent writer—is that the story wrestles with real world issues, and wrestles well, entertainingly, and effectively. The Ministry for the Future has been referenced among many climate working groups and policy groups because many of the climate proposals and solutions in the novel are so well thought out that the book provides a starting point for serious people trying to think through real solutions.

Of course I love The Ministry for the Future. That book does what I’m trying to do with The Steep Climes Quartet, although my series focuses on the issues of climate change challenges and solutions from what can be described as the hyper-local and hyper-personal fronts. Kill Well, the first book, takes place in 2026; Dear Josephine in 2029; Over Brooklyn Hills—now on pre-order, with a publication date of June 15, 2026—takes place in 2035; and the final book, Farm to Me, is set in 2047, although at this point in the manuscript’s writing, it is anybody’s guess as to publication date. In this final book of the series, I am exploring regenerative agriculture and its emergence in the Northeast as some of the major agriculture areas in the U.S. and elsewhere suffer productivity losses because of chronic droughts tied to climate change.

While I love bandying about terms like “hyper-local” and hyper-personal,” all I really mean is that the through characters of the series live in Berkshire County in Massachusetts and that readers experience how these characters think or don’t think about the climate crisis. One big shocker is that even those dedicated to fighting climate change more often think about crushes or ponder therapy-valid thoughts, or worry about paying bills or getting a job, or focus on problems of aging. For those not dedicated to the fight, climate mostly appears as a creature of the news and infosphere, unless, of course, a specific character happens to have, for example, his vegetable garden brought down by a big storm. There are a range of themes throughout the series, including the malfeasance of Big Oil and how dark money works behind the scenes. There is a fair amount of climate change information, including on policies and politics, but this is mainly from characters caught up in the fight, but even with such characters, their inner lives and personal challenges are forward.

It would have been easier to write a climate disaster book where the hero gains guns and gals amid the floods or heat, but I don’t find that as interesting as imagining what our society and culture can do to make things better in terms of the climate challenge and how people may come to join such efforts. Hint: joining in is less typically marching under banners and more in the choices—political, economic, and social—we make.

Solutions R Us

We have met the climate crisis solutions and they are us.

Heather Cox Richardson often makes the point that the United States of America doesn’t need new laws to combat Trump and Trumpism (i.e., corruption, racism, anti-democracy), but rather we need to enforce the laws that already exist (one example is the Emoluments Clause, but the Republicans, in their blind obsequious posture toward Trump, continue to shirk their Constitutional Oaths). Likewise, when it comes to climate change there are already laws passed and regulations that help, but, again, with Trump allowed to be lawlessly corrupt, such laws—like IIJA and IRA—have been nullified and climate-positive budgets withheld. And then there are also laws of the marketplace which should tilt our economy toward clean energy because the existing suite of technologies now represent the cheapest and quickest energy sources to build, right along the digital revolutions that can more efficiently harness the existing grid, but, alas, Trump has his thumb on the scale. In the end, the biggest law Americans can uphold right now for the sake of climate progress is the Constitution, and we’ll see where the midterms lead us, but that’s another story.

The fact is that while we’ve been slow to act and have fossil fuel interests combatting our efforts toward progress on climate change, we’ve already entered a time of peril. The story today is not that we can stop climate change and all its many negative consequences, but that we can continue moving forward and keep the very worst of climate change consequences at bay in the decades and centuries ahead. To me, this is the real exciting story about climate change.

Realism Itself Functions as a Political Force

I haven’t forgotten Elena Vasileva’s post. In fact, the title of this section directly quotes her.

Vasileva says, “The word ‘realistic’ is not neutral. It carries hidden assumptions about whose futures deserve legitimacy, which systems are allowed to continue unquestioned, and what forms of life are considered practical, responsible or mature.”

Really? Of course, but I’m writing climate fiction, not taking a seminar on deconstructivism.

She continues:

People start adapting to systems they no longer truly believe in, while struggling to envision coherent alternatives. Exhaustion becomes normalised. Endless growth becomes treated as inevitable. Competition becomes framed as human nature. Hyper-productivity becomes associated with value, morality and worth….

At the same time, radically different ways of organising society often appear emotionally or politically unintelligible, even when current conditions are visibly failing.

Right. Got it. The more interesting point Vasileva makes is that the colonized imagination collapses “collective imagination,” as she writes:

Imagination is often framed as something individual, almost decorative, as though it belongs mainly to artists, writers or children. In reality, imagination is deeply social. Every institution, economy, law, city and technological system first existed as an imagined possibility before it became material reality.

Societies require the capacity to imagine differently in order to evolve.

Or, as we used to say in the Counter-Culture, reality is a shared hallucination, man.

Imagination as Transformation

Vasileva argues that our current culture is aimed at optimization and away from transformation, and so people “become highly informed about collapse while feeling increasingly incapable of imagining transformation.”  She targets algorithms as a mechanism for the optimization slant today, and as a former Facebook user, I know what she’s talking about. She names narrative lock-in that not only supports misinformation but imaginative limitation.

But is “imaginative limitation” the cause of so many shallowly fanciful treatments of climate change in fiction? I consider that the scope of story can be responsible for imaginative limitation, because to imagine a whole world, with all its complications and contradictions, rather than a simple subset, is hard work. It is easier to imagine people who develop physic abilities to talk to plants or a class of humans who now have gills than it is to imagine the world with all its complexity moving forward toward climate progress, with all attendant set-backs, disagreements, mixed motives, and other confusing Hobbesian or Lockean beliefs about mankind.

Vasileva talks about “transformative futures” that ask more of people emotionally and culturally, and politics—as one example—is an important element in our culture, so perhaps we might say that political forces function as a shaper of reality.

In fact, we agree on a lot, although not on the use of the Oxford comma. She goes on in her post about Ursula K. Le Guin and Octavia Butler as examples of storytellers of speculative fiction that holds transformative potential:

Stories do far more than entertain. They shape emotional possibility. They influence what people perceive as imaginable, desirable, ethical and attainable. Stories rehearse worlds before societies build them materially.

Speculative storytelling creates enough distance from dominant assumptions for people to question systems that previously appeared fixed and permanent. Science fiction, speculative fiction and futures storytelling all expand perception by revealing that social structures are constructed rather than inevitable.

I agree, but her statement that “Reclaiming imagination requires more than individual creativity. It requires rebuilding cultural spaces where experimentation, uncertainty and alternative futures can be explored collectively,” seems like a restatement of what art and imagination does. It seems to me that this doesn’t have to get more complicated than that.

What is rightly complicated are stories that deal with the complex challenges, barriers, and human shortcomings that keep us from building our Eden.

But then again, living in Eden? What’s the fun, the challenge, the interest in that? I can’t imagine.

The post Climate Fiction Featuring Far Futures, Dystopia, Fantasies, and Other Simplified Worlds, is Simply Much Easier to Write first appeared on David Guenette.

For the writer/production editor/publisher, the advent of Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) back in November 2007 changed the landscape of trade publishing for good and bad. Keep in mind that we are two decades into the real start of ebooks, even though, as an editor of digital publishing professional periodicals, I’d attended two earlier cycles of ebook conferences starting sometime in the late 1980s, and the idea of ebooks had been around for an even longer time. Ted Nelson and his book Hypertext, anyone?

As it turned out, it took Amazon’s commitment to this emerging marketplace to provide momentum out of the starting gate. Keep in mind that Amazon was still in early stages of its world domination and was a generally well-regarded corporation doing what many people thought were helpful things. Things like online shopping, fast shipping, competitive prices, and other sorts of attractive retail behavior. The common view of Amazon these days is negative, and for many good reasons. I won’t go into details here—they’re well-known. In fact, I’ve done my share of critiquing, including writing essays titled “Horsewhip Jeff Bezos, Part One” and “Horsewhip Jeff Bezos, Part Two.” If you want an excellent description of what’s going on with online platforms, read Cory Doctorow’s essays on “enshittification.”

What It Takes for Books to Gain “The Channels”

The third book of The Steep Climes Quartet, Over Brooklyn Hills, is on pre-order, with a publication date of June 15, 2026, but in order to make the book and the others in the series as widely available as possible, hoops must be jumped through.

Amazon is the single largest bookseller in the known universe, and the platform makes buying books easy (unlike the search function for most other goods available through Amazon), so there’s that. Get the book on Amazon and Bob‘s your uncle, that’s the thinking. But there’s also significant opposition to Amazon these days and, understandably, especially so from other booksellers and book buyers loyal to independent bookstores and those all-around anti-Amazon folks. Bookshop.org has done a decent job providing an Amazon alternative for online book-buying and has the anti-Amazon public’s support mainly because it directs the sales to independent bookstores.

If I want to sell my books in independent bookstores in addition to Amazon, I can. Well, I can if my book has a real ISBN and doesn’t use the one Amazon freely offers publishers, which isn’t a real ISBN, but an ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number) that is independent of the ISBN usage by other bookstores. The practical consequence is that other bookstores simply won’t sell ASIN-only books, and it is not merely pique on their part, but also logistical: the rest of the trade book selling world uses ISBN inventory and pricing for their stock, something Amazon has known to be the case for decades upon decades. I also need to make sure that my books are available through a book distributor so that independent bookstores can order them, which for the trade market in the U.S. means Ingram, and don’t you know they own Lightning Source, an online platform for publishing both print and ebooks.

So now I’m using two publishing platforms, both of which produce the books as print-on-demand.

Of course, there also is the issue of ebook production, format, and distribution. For KDP, that’s easy enough and the ingestion interface has gotten better over time, so there are fewer publishers now having strokes when trying to get an ebook—a Kindle—out into the world. Of course, when you publish through KDP you’re limited to selling the Kindle ebook through Amazon, unless, that is, you use an additional ebook publishing platform, where the real value is in its distribution, ebook production being relatively easy. Alternate ebook distribution makes the ebook—ePub—available through Apple Books, Kobo, Barnes and Noble, and many other channels, including into libraries. I’ve found Draft2Digital effective in this way.

So now I’m using three publishing platforms.

The Signal-to-Noise Challenge Loudly Continues

Of course, so are millions of other self-publishers, or whatever the actual number is, using publishing platforms. There are 3-4 million such books reportedly getting published annually these days, at least according to people who wish to break my spirit, as the sheer volume of new books creates a signal-to-noise problem for those searching for a particular book or ebook. I’m jumping through hoops making sure that my books are available through many channels, all in the hope that people will seek the books out and buy them. There’s the needle-in-a-haystack problem, something metadata and the right keywords were supposed to solve, but now there’s a humongous haystack that keeps discoverability difficult. AI search that adds context derived from the actual content of the book instead of relying just on metadata is the next great hope, but really, the search engines and social platforms want to sell ads, promising discoverability for a price.

Who knew that I wasn’t going to become rich by writing fiction?!

Well, as things stand today, my goal is to sell enough books to more or less cover my costs, so that my modest retirement funds don’t too rapidly disappear. And I haven’t yet included audiobooks to the equation, not because audiobooks are a bad idea, but because the main platform, Audible, is now owned by Amazon, and the whole royalty setup is downright terrible for authors. Also, I’m still annoyed that most people seem to like audiobooks more than print or ebooks, and, yes, I’m still sulking.

The post The World of Amazon Publishing and the Hoops a Publisher Jumps Through to Participate in the World of Amazon Publishing first appeared on David Guenette.

I will keep the name of this beta-reader to myself, so to avoid an uncomfortable paparazzi-crushing lifestyle change for him, thank you very much. He was talking with me about Dear Josephine, my second book in the literary climate fiction series The Steep Climes Quartet. He was referring to the number of times the term that stands in for all the external costs the use of fossil fuel shifts to the public and not counted among the producers’ costs in fossil fuel production.

Externalities: You know, things like health problems that are attributed to pollution and particulates.

Here’s an AI summary on this particular externality:

Based on studies released in 2025, air pollution from burning fossil fuels causes millions of premature deaths annually worldwide, with a significant portion stemming from fine particulate matter. While total air pollution causes over 4 million to 7.9 million deaths annually, specific studies in 2025 indicated that fossil fuel air pollution alone causes roughly 2.5 million deaths annually. [1, 2, 3]

Key Findings Related to Fossil Fuel Deaths (2025 Context):

• • Global Impact: Air pollution from fossil fuel combustion is responsible for roughly 1 in 5 deaths worldwide.
  • Specific Fuel Impact (US): A 2025 study in Science Advances found that pollution from oil and gas extraction and use causes over 90,000 premature deaths in the US annually.
  • Regional Impact: The highest mortality impacts from fossil fuel-related PM2.5 are observed in China, India, and parts of the US, Europe, and Southeast Asia.
  • Health Burden: These deaths are primarily linked to PM2.5, nitrogen dioxide (NO2), and other toxic pollutants that cause cardiovascular disease, respiratory infections, and cancer.
  • Household Fuels: In addition to ambient (outdoor) pollution, solid fuel use in homes results in millions of additional deaths in countries with low access to clean energy. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]

You can nitpick the sources, and it is likely that Clean Air Fund has higher death counts than you’re likely to find in reports from the American Petroleum Institute. The footnote links are live in the above AI summary, if you want to check out sources.

But we all understand that pollution is not good for people’s health, but as an externality the costs accrued from health problems related to air pollution are paid by everybody, not by the producers of the fossil fuel products that create the pollution.

We all understand that the last two centuries’ rush to provide energy to industry, transportation, households, and institutions has dumped enormously more greenhouse gases into our atmosphere. So much so that this has been altering our climate. Like the negative consequences to health, it is increasingly evident that greenhouse gases produce economic costs for the world, costs that all of us pay for, not costs paid for by the producers of the fossil fuel products that significantly contribute to climate change. In this way, climate change is another of fossil fuel’s externalities.

Here’s the AI summary of the recent estimates on the costs of fossil fuel externalities:

Based on the December 2025 IMF [International Monetary Fund] update, global implicit fossil fuel subsidies—representing underpriced environmental costs—totaled $6.7 trillion in 2024 (5.8% of global GDP). These externalities, which primarily include damages from air pollution and climate change, constitute the vast majority of total fossil fuel support, while explicit fiscal subsidies totaled $725 billion. [1, 2, 3]

Key Details on IMF Externalities Estimates (2025 Update)

• • Total Subsidy Value: In 2024, total subsidies (explicit + implicit) exceeded $7 trillion.
  • Implicit Breakdown: The $6.7 trillion in implicit subsidies (undercharged externalities) are primarily driven by:
    • Air Pollution: Responsible for approximately 3/4 of total underpriced environmental costs.
    • Climate Change: A significant, rising component of the total, with costs projected to rise until 2035.
  • Externalities by Fuel: Petroleum accounts for about half of total subsidies, while coal accounts for nearly two-fifths.
  • Regional Impact: 80% of global coal consumption is priced below half of its efficient level. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Impact of Correcting Prices

• • Health Benefits: Full removal of implicit and explicit subsidies could lead to over 1 million fewer premature air pollution deaths per year.
  • Climate Goals: Correcting these prices could reduce global CO2 emissions by 46% below baseline levels by 2035.
  • Fiscal Gain: Implementing efficient pricing would raise government revenues by roughly 0.6% to 3.6% of global GDP. [1, 2, 3]

The IMF defines efficient prices as those covering supply costs, environmental damages, and standard consumer taxes.

In this post, I’m already up to nine “externalities” appearances. Maybe the beta reader had a point? (Here’s a recent post, Writing The Steep Climes Quartet, Part 2: Economics in Climate Fiction, on presenting economic facts and figures within climate fiction, including, I’m sure, the concept of “externalities.”)

By the way, even I could see this was a problem and the revisions in the Dear Josephine manuscript cut the use of the term by more than half.

How—and Why—Do I Talk about Externalities in a Climate Fiction Book?

I wanted to bring in the concept of externalities in Dear Josephine to show some of the real costs of using fossil fuels. My thinking is that as more people understand such costs, the more economically competitive the clean energy transition looks. Keep in mind that at this point in time adding clean energy to our total energy portfolio is already likely cheaper and faster to build than fossil fuel-based energy even before externalities costs are factored in. And the externalities and direct subsidies costs is a very big number. Well, $7 trillion/annually certainly seems a significant sum to me, but I’m not great at math.

How did I incorporate the discussion of fossil fuel externalities in a novel that takes place in 2029? I could have done it by having one or another character read about it in the mainstream media, but I believe the topic is still likely to be the domain of specialists in 2029.

What I did was have two different types of specialists thinking about externalities. The first character, Jeannie Louise Smith, a resident of Great Barrington, is established as a recurring figure within the quartet. She’s an analyst of climate change and policy, making her living writing reports on commission or working with other like-minded analysts, freelancing articles for various professional and general market publications, and through her articles, essays, and editorials on RE:CC, her bitbytes-platformed blog. She’s in her seventies, so she still thinks in terms of blogs, but in the series, bitbytes is a new Substack-like platform with better features, including micropayment support. She’s a go-to for general media editors who want public-facing content that explains things like externalities or climate change policy fights, market consequences, and more.

In Dear Josephine, it is newly post-Trump. The MAGA and special interests-repudiated Congress is back in the business of dealing with America’s real-world problems and energy costs remain a big problem, as does climate-change-related challenges of mitigation, resiliency, and adaptation. There’s a big congressional bill in committee addressing coastal vulnerabilities. Various interests are trying to influence the bill’s scope. The Seawall Act is a big bill that needs significant funding allocated if it passes, and spending offsets will be part of the fight. Some—like Jeannie Louise—think fossil fuel subsidies might be ready for attack.

Enter a villain in the form of Gerald Greene, executive director of a fictitious fossil fuel think tank, the Kehoe Institute. He has anxious clients, plenty of dark money, and various nefarious schemes. He’s also working on a strategy paper aimed at keeping the issue of externalities off the table. Greene wants to keep the whole issue of externalities from seeing the light of day.

Readers get to see Jeannie Louise wrestling with the challenge of communicating the concept of externalities to the general public while Greene hopes some sleight of hand acceding to the cancellation of some explicit fossil fuel subsidies might do the trick of keeping externalities from the debate. By agreeing to terminate explicit, or direct, subsidies—such as accounting exceptions and advantageous tax codes—Big Oil interests can project a cooperative image while surrendering only a few billion dollars. This maneuver serves to protect the far more lucrative advantage of ignored externalities, which effectively provide an annual $600+billion benefit to American fossil fuel corporations through avoided costs. Can Greene redirect the conversation away from externalities, a confusing and hard to explain concept?

Now you’re going to my home page to buy the books, right?

Weaving in Climate Change Information

The series relies on well-drawn characters, some of whom are engaged directly in the climate change fights, but most of the characters are regular people who get information about climate change mostly from the news and not necessarily paying close attention. After all, for most of us the pressures of our daily lives—jobs, relationships, family, bills, and the other topics of our daily existence—take precedence. Davin, for example, who’s caught up doing platform architecture and system administration for a local interactive “shopper” newspaper, and who wishes he had more time in his art studio, is the sort of person who allows distraction and procrastination into his life. Sometimes a news story captures his attention and he falls down any number of rabbit holes chasing links. There’s part of a chapter to Kill Well, the first book, where’s Davin’s reading his news online about a big methane plume and follows links back to earlier, even bigger, methane leak incidents. Why? Well, he’s kind of interested in climate change, but really, he’s more interested in losing himself in the news rather than getting to his work of generating the month’s Ads-to-Sales report.

There are other native mechanisms for slipping in climate content in bits and pieces. TVs are on, or more likely, news alerts or pop-up videos or phone notifications while people go about their business. Sometimes just a stray piece of a news item is noticed. Sometimes characters have specific interests and set up notifications. Google has been applying AI to improve personalized news delivery. Sometimes someone might mention something of interest—maybe about weird weather, or some disaster, or the fate of some local denizen—while standing in line at the post office or coffee shop. Just like in the real world, climate change is part of the digital static background of the characters’ lives.

Can Boosting Climate Change Information be Thrilling?

There’s another mechanism for providing information about climate change, which is to present thriller-like plot lines that involve specific climate change elements. In Kill Well, the book starts with a young fossil fuel divestiture activist witnessing her boss’s murder while they are heading to a divestment pitch. She’s freaked out, she flees, and starts heading to Boston, not quite sure where she might be safe. On the bus bound for Las Vegas, she finds herself wondering if they’ll pass close to some of the wildfires, and to remind herself where the big fires are she checks CNN on the crappy TV embedded into the back of bus seats. She gets to Chicago, but the upper mid-west is socked in a tough and long heatwave, and on the train heading east she meets a young man who’s heading home to the Berkshires to escape the heatwave and his dropping post-layoff bank balance. The plot line gets the action into the Berkshires, where the books’ principal through-characters live and where the series is grounded, and some of the plot drivers are climate change related.

In Dear Josephine, in 2029, there’s a hurricane that devastates Miami, but the reader learns about it through the perspectives of the Berkshire County characters. I didn’t want characters at ground zero. I wanted the readers to encounter the destruction at a remove, since this is the way most of us—remember Helene?—experience such events. The disaster is covered in the news, of course, and it’s a huge story and no one is unaffected and there’s plenty of continuing coverage for a chunk of chapters. The Miami-destroying hurricane in Dear Josephine has the news bring up climate change. As best I remember (What? You want me to keep rereading my own books?!), there’s little that even the resident expert on climate change Jeannie Louise says about the storm and climate change attribution.

In Over Brooklyn Hills, which takes place in 2035, the southern part of Berkshire County is bursting at the seams with hordes of young hipsters up from the heatwave-dominated New York City and the locals have to figure out how to treat them, including all the free-campers out in the woods of Monument Mountain. The theme, if you’re asked in your English class, is climate migration, but the local action is climate migration writ small and presented not pedantically but woven into the actions and scenes. Of course, there are news stories about climate migration and the deadly violence that results along part of the border of Pakistan and India, and there’s the thriller element involving a climate action terrorist group and the cartels that references climate migration on our own southern border. Add in a small dash of local extreme weather and slightly salty climate change politics, and presto!

Or so the theory goes.

What I Fear about Climate Change Information Dissemination in Fiction

In various Substack comments and correspondence with those involved in climate fiction, I’ve considered the issue of efficacy of climate fiction to inform readers. The nature of any particular work of climate fiction is one issue, where, for example, apocalyptic tales remain a big part of the genre. Such tales seem less likely to help readers identify with the world they live in today. I like a good story of future dystopia as much as the next gun-toting fella, but I, along with many others, suspect that how we make progress on climate change is helped by writing stories in which readers can see themselves. I’m guessing here, but I don’t think most of us see ourselves racing around a desert landscape seeking the last drop of water or paddling around on a homemade raft hoping to find land not yet surrendered to the sea.

Does climate fiction, to be effective, need to capture the interest of the reader? That’s what’s called a rhetorical question. If one is trying to give readers some sense of the struggle we have with changing climate, it seems best that the reader wants to read the book, right? Yeah, rhetorical question yet again.

I recently read Habitat Man, by D. A. Baden, because the book aims to supply the reader information about climate change and other challenges to our environment, especially around biodiversity. While I have several complaints about the book, one issue is the mechanism used to deliver the information. The structure of the book includes the title character going to various home gardens and giving the owners guidance on how to make a more productive and welcoming space for creatures great and small, while ruminating about all the anti-biodiversity stuff we do. The larger point is valid, in that every better garden is a step towards climate progress, but the world isn’t going to grow itself out of climate change one garden at a time, even if the penchant for gardens is exported around the world from the green isles of Avalon.

I’ve recently posted on the concept of Thrutopian climate fiction, with which D. A. Baden is associated: Let’s Talk About Climate Optimism and Hope That We Can Write About Doing Something About Climate Change

I came away from Habitat Man feeling like a remedial learner, where the classes were all the same and there were plenty of them, and mostly all about worms and insects and what bird eats what and composting and composting toilets. I’m sure that composting toilets are helpful in reclaiming a healthy environment—and hey, I was introduced to composting toilets back in 1989, thank you very much—but transitioning to clean energy and moving away from fossil fuels seems the more dominant requirement today. I’m all for reducing methane and I do give a shit, but letting people be aware of, say, legislative solutions that can pick the biggest low hanging fruit demands our more immediate attention. Or maybe I have gone down the garden path, at least metaphorically.

But the characteristic of Habitat Man that makes my hands sweat is the transparent and rote manner the curriculum is delivered. The repetition of the sequential garden visits is one problem, especially as there are plenty of gardens visited, but the same lessons are also repeated, or so it seems, every time the main character passes a public garden or flower bed or ventures out onto the common or walks along some bit of half nature. From reading D. A. Baden’s essays about climate fiction, I’m confident that relaying climate change-relevant information was one of her goals for this romantic comedy novel.

I am, I’ll have you know, ready for the quiz. In fact, I’m pretty sure I was ready only few chapters in. It’s weird to have an info dump in the middle of a garden, composting toilet or not.

Am I doing a similar thing in The Step Climes Quartet? Too many “externalities” in the text?

I sure hope not, but I’ll need some external validation to put that worry to rest.

The post The Challenge of Conveying Climate Change Information in Climate Fiction first appeared on David Guenette.

As an entrepreneur, writer, and climate change activist, I’ve studied climate change science and policies for two decades and believe that the most effective basis for the discussion of the climate crisis is realism, both in science and the stories. I believe climate fiction can be an effective way for individuals and communities to identify with climate change challenges and that climate fiction can inform an individual’s personal actions and a community’s choices. Stories can offer alternative and surprisingly effective perspectives for understanding the climate crisis and on approaches for dealing with climate change. Climate fiction that focuses on the reader’s familiar sense of social order and circumstances and recognizable experiences may better explain the nature of the crisis and foster a more powerful identification with the problems we face.

The Themes, like Climate Change Itself, Have Shifted Over Time

The main theme of The Steep Climes Quartet is our fractured society and the solidarity climate progress requires of us and our communities. This theme, I hate to admit, still carries true.

Even over the course of writing the series—I started in 2015—other themes have evolved and now include some source of hope in the form of an economically competitive clean energy transition. Don’t think I’ve grown pollyannish, though, since important plotlines involve various misdeeds by Big Oil and take into consideration the element of slow progress that typically marks the efforts of political bodies and society at large. Still, by Book Three, Over Brooklyn Hills, 2035 sees that core court cases against Big Oil are finally starting to break for the climate, but then again, these same corporations and their political allies (or to use a more crass appellation, their “bum boys”) have managed to get too many gas-fired generator plants in place, with the net result of slowing progress in carbon emission reductions.

In the first three books, the residents of the Berkshires—a pleasant bucolic place, by the way—don’t have a lot of direct experience with the immediate consequences of climate change, but like most of us, hear about such negative consequences mostly through the news. Kill Well, in 2026, has a big heatwave in the upper Midwest, and the West is experiencing another plague of wildfires, but the Berkshire-based main character Davin, an economically pressed recent divorcee, may have some talking points about the climate down, kind of, and all the right intentions, kind of, but like most others, he’s mostly caught up in worrying about rising costs and his Airbnb apartment and his work. The worst thing that happens to him, climate-effect wise, is that a heavy rain damages a part of the Airbnb apartment on the first floor of his Housatonic house. The character and the much of the nation are still stunned by Trump’s reelection and all the resulting chaos from that clown show. There’s a plot line of a young woman on the run after witnessing her fossil fuel divestiture boss killed on a business trip, which brings her to Chicago, where Davin’s son is living his first year out of college, and the two meet on the train heading toward Boston, and she ends up at Davin’s house, and there’s a contract killer in play, too. A prevailing sub-theme is the widespread economic stress of rising costs and the recession-like state of the nation’s economy that retards, along with Trump, clean energy work.

Dear Josephine is different in that the climate consequence focus is Miami’s destruction by the combination of a powerful hurricane hitting in sync with high ocean surges, and the residents of Berkshires are unaffected directly, of course, although taken up among the multitude shocked by the event, with many trying to figure out how to help. Oh yeah, there’s a guy running around trying to kill billionaires and a guy using Kill the Rich as cover for his own assassinations for fossil fuels think tanks in order to ease some newly inconvenient political ex-allies off the board. And yeah, in Dear Josephine there’s a fair amount of conversation and thinking about externalities, which sounds as exciting to you as a reader and it does to me as the author, right? I think I pulled it off. Does the appearance of a climate action terrorist group make the medicine go down? The sub-theme here is the evil intents of those who run fossil fuel empires and the growing anxiety that their golden egg is hatching trouble. Will Big Oil turn even more savage as the clean energy transition starts to take a bite out of the energy market? I’m pretty sure I nailed this; read the headlines and tell me I’m wrong about Big Oil.

Over Brooklyn Hills, now back from the editor and in the midst of review and then to formatting (and then to proofreading, and then…) is six years after the second book and nine years after the first. MAGA, repudiated in the 2026 mid-term and 2028 elections, has given way to economic reforms and climate policies and America has rejoined much of the rest of the world in making climate progress. The sub-themes include the consequences of choosing violence, as the climate terrorist group now finds itself involved with Mexican cartels and three-quarters of the way toward becoming a criminal organization. The primary theme, though, is about climate migration, and because of a long heatwave hovering over the New York metropolitan area, the Berkshires finds itself with very many more young people (i.e., typically less economically advantaged) escaping the heat and the energy bills demanded for safety, and the towns of South County and the second-homers aren’t enjoying the change in the character of their summer. Of course, the migrant movement at the southern border is a bigger problem, and the violence between parts of Pakistan and India and the portions of their populations on the move from devastating heatwaves is seeing tens of thousands of deaths, largely through paramilitary violence. But up here in the relatively cool green hills, we can be put out by the waves of body odor from those free camping in the woods as we line up at So-Co Creamery to get the kids some ice cream.

Farm to Me, which is mostly a mess of notes and line items for further research, sees 2047 with climate change reducing, due to chronic drought, the yields of some of the once highly productive agricultural areas in the U.S. New England has been experiencing a resurgence of its once dominant industry, agriculture. There’s been some real progress with carbon emission reduction, but climate change is locked in place, albeit at levels that could be worse without modest progress. Resiliency and adaptation programs are the rage, but climate change continues to exert a downward pressure on the economy. It turns out that poisoning the Earth’s atmosphere for centuries has some negative consequences. Who knew?

The fourth book’s themes will include that human nature remains a good news/bad news puzzle, with a murder mystery that may be tied to one ambitious New England food distribution company trying to take over other food distributors. There will be the sub-theme of the angst and agony of the young about the future, where the cumulative effects of climate change pile on. Tipping points, for instance, are getting more attention, but, yeah, a lot less love, that’s for sure.

What It Takes (to Write the Series)

I’d be happy enough to put down my long-running autodidact effort on climate change, but alas, climate models keep getting tweaked and plentiful research continues. Science never sleeps, and all too often, I feel that I need to be on the growing edge of climate change knowledge 24/7, which I can’t be, of course. Currently, for instance, there are new findings and expanded concepts about faster rising temperatures than previous conventional understanding has posited, and I’ve had to make my best guess that 2035 will see the rise of 1.7-1.8 Celsius in the global annual average. By the time I have the fourth book’s manuscript well in hand, I’ll have to best guess about further global annual average temperature rise in 2047, by being as well-informed as I can be to determine that guess.

One objective of the series is to present climate change as accurately as possible and with the best scientific grounding. In this way, readers who may not be similarly inclined to keep up with the science and policies may consider their own understanding advanced, and, yes, this is something of an illusion for those future timelines, but then novels are derived from the creative act of controlled illusion. Yet more speculative, I suspect, will be the political winds and social expectations governing these timelines, made all the more challenging because making assumptions about such trends requires forecasting political and societal developments that march on up and down and sideways.

An example of this challenge of future forecasting happened when I was preparing Dear Josephine for production in 2024.The national election was underway, with Harris and Trump trading leads a number of times. The situation was sufficiently unclear, so I paused in order to suss out which way the wind was blowing. My original working assumption in the manuscript was that Harris would win, and the Biden-era clean energy work would continue, but at times this seemed less or more likely. And then November 7 happened and Trump prevailed, and after recovering from the shock, I was back to work on the manuscript to have the book’s 2029 timeline reflect this dark turn in American politics. Before I shifted the Dear Josephine story to reflect the political reality, there was similar work to do with the already published Kill Well, which has the story taking place in 2026, and so a Trump-ascendent revision was issued. The main thing I got out of this experience was this joke: Who knew that writing near-future fiction wasn’t easy?

There are other problems to solve in attempting to portray the future. These include representations of technology development, but here I think I’ve taken the right approach. Science fiction books tend to over-emphasize technology’s advancement, but for 2026, major advancements were known and other than a few mentions of how AI is becoming part of the characters’ work-a-day worlds. All the surveillance tech that figured into a plotline—things like Ring cameras and ways to hide IP tracking in emails—were already sufficiently prevalent, and a few other cyber-related tech was (one hopes) sufficiently covered by plausible handwaving. For Dear Josephine in 2029, AI is more prevalent, but not by a lot, and, no, no flying cars or major new technological developments, and that’s because human economies and technologies role out more slowly than the sci-fi-inclined often hope. Not just more slowly but also quite unevenly (tip o’ the cap to William Gisbson!), and most of the characters in this series are regular people and not pioneering tech heads.

Jump ahead to 2035, and in Over Brooklyn Hills AI and the spread of some other technologies advance, with smart glasses and haptic feedback and some modest virtual reality interfaces showing up through uneven adoption rates and with varying levels of interest. Davin, a content management systems architect involved with an online “local newspaper,” is a bit tech-forward, but he’s in his early seventies in 2035 and set in his ways, with his biggest tech adoption being a wide-screen interactive monitor that he can gesture at to swipe and select away using haptic wrist bands, but otherwise he’s using his laptop pretty much the way most people today do with keyboard and some voice interface. There’s the 6G networks that provide ubiquitous Wi-Fi.

This challenge of moderating regular people’s interactions with tech changes grows harder the further one goes into the future but faulting on the side of less-is-more is the right bet. For the Farm to Me story taking place in 2047, there’s a part that involves regenerative agriculture, and there are advances in sensor technologies that can accurately analyze carbon sequestration in soil. This sort of development is not a big stretch but rather an incremental improvement in monitoring systems, not doubt aided by AI-based computations. Still no flying cars, at least in any sort of common use by regular people. Improved information search and analysis is to be expected, of course, and this is likely to get some attention, but likely focused on the tension between those who desire better results than the low-hanging fruit of the personalization and prediction engines that typify Spotify and Netflix today. There will be some movement toward direct democracy, although mostly in the form of growing public interest and hardly a done deal. The production and markets for cultured meat and fermentation-based protein are becoming well established. The failure of property insurance and the threat to housing markets in some areas will be leaking into the general economy. There will be some new nuclear reactors, although fewer than one might expect, since such energy production is hampered by high costs and bankruptcies.

In Farm to Me, I’m looking at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, which happens to be based in Great Barrington, and you may remember Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered that was written by the founder E.F. Schumacher. I want to consider what the shift toward a more local economy might look like, especially in response to climate change, although this will be more in the background, I suspect. Did I mention no flying cars?

Of course, I’ve got to write the damn thing first.

The post Writing the Future of Climate Change first appeared on David Guenette.

Everybody tries to figure things out, although what is being figured out is hardly the same for everyone. Nor is the method for figuring things out the same for everyone, with academics a class of its own, and this applies to climate fiction, too.

Here’s how “Six books to help you explore the role of storytelling in the climate fight,” starts:

Humans are storytelling animals. 

That, at least, is one of the stories that humans tell about themselves. We are not logic machines or information processors; we need the tug of a narrative thread to carefully follow an argument. 

This poses a challenge for science, especially climate science, which has such a long timeframe, such a vast playing field, and way too many characters. But climate scientists, social scientists, reporters, and activists have tried, in permutating collaborations, to meet this challenge. And they have stories to tell about their efforts. (Or should we call them quests?) 

You have to love academics, and I mean this positively. Appearing in Yale Climate Connections, this article runs the deck, “This special selection includes books on storytelling, science, and climate change.” The article is found through an initiative of the Yale Center for Environmental Communication. The article is written by Michael Svoboda and was published on January 30, 2026. Svoboda has been at George Washington University and teaching in the writing program there for two decades-plus, where “… he has pursued two very different research programs—on ancient Greek rhetoric and on communicating climate change. In 2010, he became a regular contributor to Yale Climate Connections. His current book project—and the focus of his year with GW’s Humanities Center—will further develop pieces he wrote for YCC on how climate change is depicted in advertising, in popular books and magazines, in documentaries and fictional movies, and in American political cartoons and commentary.”

Like I said, you got to love academics.

There’s a sub-industry on climate fiction these days and this recent Yale Climate Connections contribution is but one manifestation. Not that the books covered in this article are necessarily focused on climate fiction, but rather are books on the forms and values of storytelling about matters including climate change. I’ve read none of them, although I have looked a bit at We All Die in the End: Storytelling in the Climate Apocalypse and read the generous, albeit hopscotched, “Read sample.” I found myself impressed.

Not surprisingly, as a writer of what I call “literary climate fiction,” I have a dog in this hunt. I’ve reviewed quite a few cli-fi books, dived deep into such pools as Climate Fiction Writers League, and explored various academically-oriented programs looking at climate fiction or more generally the topic of storytelling associated with or applied to climate fiction.

Here’s a list of posts about climate fiction on my website published since September 2025:

• Climate Fiction, Climate Fantasy: What’s the right mix of hope and disappointment? 
• Let’s Talk About Climate Optimism and Hope That We Can Write About Doing Something About Climate Change
• Is Climate Hope Fiction Hopeless?
• Climate Fiction, Optimism, and Realism
• Fun with Apocalypse, Part 2
• Writing The Steep Climes Quartet, Part 2: Economics in Climate Fiction
• Climate Change and the Human Condition
• Writing Villains on Both Sides in Climate Fiction
• Democracy, Climate Action, Climate Fiction… and Criminality
• Why We Write: A look back at why the heck I’m writing a four-book climate fiction series

There are more, going back to mid-2023, too, back when the first book of The Steep Climes Quartet, Kill Well, was published, although I’m not sure what this tells me. Maybe that I’m a slow learner or that I still have questions about what kinds of climate fiction may be most efficacious?

Climate Fiction’s Scorecard

There are plenty of great climate fiction works out there. I place Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future in the top tier, although the scale is global and across many domains and the book carries a lot of policy wonkiness, but entertainingly so. The Deluge, by Stephen Markley, is another solid work along a similar scope as Ministry. Flight Behavior, by Barbara Kingsolver, places readers into the lives of everyday characters, encouraging readers to live alongside these characters in regular lives, even as the sublime aspects of climate change manifest. Weather, by Jenny Offill, accomplishes much the same, but at an even subtler level. Snowflake: A Novel, by Arthur Jeon, is a book I’ve greatly appreciated both for its form—journal entries by a climate/Trump obsessive high school senior with spectrum disorder—and its perspective, and there are a number of independently published works by others of note, but if you want to see more, look under “Other Writing” category on my website for reviews.

You’ll also see books that carry my complaint. One critical aspect is catastrophic climate occurrences that fall outside of known science. Another critique is focused on books that re-write human culture as climate solution or adaptation, pre-supposing either the passage of time or major human cultural shift, or both. These sorts of climate fiction can be engaging but represent what I term the “You can’t get there from here” problem.

What most concerns me is the question of how writers get people interested in climate change action, which for me seems mostly that of political action (i.e., voting) to affect legislation supporting the renewable energy transition. In America today, this has become part and parcel of the struggle to continue our democratic experiment, where today’s emerging authoritative threat bleeds into the fight between fossil fuel’s policy ascendancy and the anti-competitive market conditions being imposed on the clean energy transition. Traditional storytelling, such as the hero’s journey or a main focus on action plots or disaster stories, I argue, keep people from identifying with the current situation, even if such stories can be satisfying reads in and of themselves. Unfortunately, few of us are indeed heroes or survivalists or champions on the international stage. Most of us find our attention taken up with paying next month’s rent or mortgage payment, or current or dreamed of relationships, or the grocery or utility bill. An individual’s positive climate action takes place within the quotidian and having readers identify with characters’ experiences seems the way to bridge our everyday concerns with climate concerns, and not by making people into outsized heroes but rather by showing more informed citizens who realize the normal actions within which they participate can lead to better outcomes. Still, the range of concern varies from character to character, from intense climate action involvement to indifference or denial, and why? Because this is the world in which we live and so must be represented in climate fiction to support identification by the reader with the issue of climate change and what we can do about it.

Huh. Maybe I should write an academic paper about this.

The post Figuring Out Climate Fiction first appeared on David Guenette.

The Present State of World: Them and Us

If you follow the news (ha!), you know that reducing emissions is far harder these days in the United States, thanks to Big Oil throwing pin money around to buy political influence that includes that industry acquiring President Big Oil Stooge, the man who claims that every revolution of a wind turbine costs $1000 and whose administration, through Lee Zeldin, is at this very moment killing EPA’s 2009 Endangerment Finding. This latest effort is designed to dismantle major climate regulations, including vehicle tailpipe standards and power plant emission rules. Clearly, optimism in climate progress has taken a hit in the U.S. Of course, the very continuation of America as a democratic entity is taking a hit, too.

On the other hand, market forces are pushing clean energy forward faster and faster. There’s a simple reason why clean energy is having its day in many other parts of the world and led by China. The reason is that clean energy is now cheaper, in and of itself, and even cheaper for undeveloped countries that may have a limited ailing grid system but can now directly build ubiquitous microgrids. Global South countries can “leapfrog” the large and capital-intensive centralized grid infrastructure. So, yes, grounds for optimism for reducing emissions are to be found in many parts of the world. China and India—not exactly small polluting players—both show signs of coal use plateauing, hence the plateauing of carbon emissions. Many other nations provide good instances for optimism, too.

Unfortunately, petrostates, among which America can be considered current King, are playing hardball. The anticipated AI boom, with its attendant needs for data centers, is seen as argument for adding hundreds of new gas electricity generation plants over the next decades. Trump and his minions are keeping coal plants active despite their absurdly higher costs. The quickest and cheapest way to expand electricity capacity is to update the grids to better manage the excess capacity that currently exists, but somehow new gas plants and building out new grids are the order of the day, while future nuclear reactors the order of tomorrow. Windfarm projects get shut down and solar and battery projects go to the back of the interconnect queue, as we are told to dream of fusion and pretend that natural gas is a “clean” fuel.

How the Story is Shaping Up

Writing the American perspective about where we’re headed to address climate change is depressing at the moment. In fact, Kill Well, the first book in the series and published in the second half of 2023, takes place in 2026, but it had to be revised away from the initial rosier picture of continuing Biden-type climate and clean energy actions. The revision was to accommodate the shocking taking of the White House and Congress by Trump a little more than a year after the original publication date.

Dear Josephine, taking place in 2029, is the second book of the Steep Climes Quartet. This book was meant to be published in the Fall of 2024, but the necessary Trump-caused rewrites pushed publication to Spring 2025. The good news (fictionally speaking) is that Trump’s reign was soundly repudiated in the midterms of 2026 and election of 2028, and by 2029 the new administration is working furiously to get back on track. Of course, the timelines for legislation are long and progress slow. I’m writing fiction, not fantasy, after all, or at least that’s my fervent hope.

In Dear Josephine,the nation experiences a terrible blow when Florida’s Gold Coast, home of Miami, is largely destroyed by a monster hurricane hitting at the worst time and under the worst circumstances. Despite this, America rallies. Heck, even Davin, the somewhat hapless series’ main character who lives in the Berkshires, manages to help out in his modest way. The expectation that people will be inclined to help is no stretch: what we’re seeing from the communities in Minnesota, among other places, revives our understanding that we must all work together.

Of course, underlying the Dear Josephine story are a couple of assumptions. The first assumption is that America avoids collapse as a democracy, rallying to excise the current fascist cancer. The second assumption is that Big Oil’s thumb is taken off the scales and the ecological and economic benefits of the clean energy transition are ever more attractive. This second assumption doesn’t mean that Big Oil capitulates, to absolutely no one’s surprise. Big Oil keeps fighting, but their day in court is approaching. Unfortunately, the frustrations engendered by the Trump second term and the ascendancy of the Oligarchy and the long-running pushback against clean energy gives rise to a climate action terrorist group calling itself No One is Safe, which makes sure that they are true to their word when it comes to oil executives and Big Oil’s infrastructure not being safe.

By 2035, when Over Brooklyn Hills takes place, there’s been a lot of progress on The Electrotech Revolution (thanks, Ember!). But the consequences of climate change advance as well. There’s a horrible and long heatwave that blankets NYC and parts of several Eastern states and the relatively cool green hills of the Berkshires finds itself with too many young people up from the city and everything is already booked. If you’re wondering if this story line is climate migration writ small, give yourself points. In the background of the book some big trouble is brewing with huge numbers of climate migrants around the world, including at our southern border. Our southern border is now militarized against the cartels and their various violent trades that embrace smuggling people. NOS shows up down Mexico way in a tight story line, but you’ll have to buy and read Over Brooklyn Hills when it publishes this Spring. I ain’t saying nothing.

Where the Story is Going

I have lots of notes for Farm to Me, the fourth and final book in the series, but I can’t tell you how the story plays out. I can tell you that Farm to Me takes place in 2047 and there’s a question of whether emission reductions are keeping pace against climate change problems. I’m not sure exactly how slowly, but we are all sure that we’ve moved too slowly and that the future days will see extreme weather events due to further increases in average global temperature. I’ll let you know that by 2035, in Dear Josephine, the average may be as high as 1.7 degrees centigrade, although there are those who say it’s lower and those who argue the average global temperature is higher. By 2047 the temperature will be higher yet, although I haven’t done my due diligence to come to the amount of increase.

We’re already locked into negative climate change consequences for many decades to come, and, yes, I’m being very conservative. What I know is that in this final book, droughts and water scarcity have collapsed or badly hurt some of America’s best food production areas. I’m looking forward to diving deeper into regenerative agriculture and describing how agriculture—think truck farms—has again come to the Northeast, where, all around New England, we can still find the stone wall traces of the area’s rich agricultural past.

Of course, there’s a murder from an effort to extort consolidation of competing food distribution companies. Of course, the rest of the world is heard about from the news. Of course, progress in decarbonizing the economy continues, even while other economic engines emerge for resilience and adaptation. Of course, the problems inherent in human society continue and the world of 2047 therefore is not all that different from today.

I’m writing fiction, not fantasy.

The post Climate Fiction, Climate Fantasy: What’s the right mix of hope and disappointment? first appeared on David Guenette.