I’d written a post titled “Fun with Apocalypse”, on July 10, 2023, as I was in the last editorial review and rewrite stages for Kill Well, the first book of The Steep Climes Quartet. If I remember right, Kill Well published early in Fall 2023.

I’d written, “I like a survival story as much as anyone. I’m less sanguine about taking on fundamental catastrophes for shallow entertainment, however. It strikes me as unseemly as well as potentially unhelpful or even dangerous by suggesting—as inadvertent as such suggestion might be—that nuclear war or climate change or even a zombie plague is just another of those sort of things that could happen, and boy, can they have an element of fun!”

I especially like zombies as a secret pleasure, although mostly in terms of movies and television shows, where part of my enjoyment often rests with the appreciation of the ludicrousness or stupidity of the storyline or character or production values or any and all such combinations thereof. After the first season of The Walking Dead, for instance, the fact that the characters had not developed effective means to clean up the zombie problem made me wonder if the series was about a different plague, maybe widespread lead poisoning. Yeah, I know. I can be snarky, but message me if you what to hear my top ten ways for solving The Walking Dead zombie problem.

Anyway, one point of the July 2023 post was that there are too many climate fiction stories that leave out the deeper human element, instead killing off huge numbers of people completely dry-eyed and even giddy. This isn‘t just experienced in some climate fiction works, but also in EMP-related books and a slew of post-nuclear war holocaust novels or any other such stories grounded in wide-spread immense catastrophes.

Another and more central point of that post was that well-written or not, climate fiction that sets itself in a future post-disaster time means that the novel isn’t set in our own time and therefore less likely to offer readers opportunities to directly identify with the characters and settings of the story. There’s no guarantee that setting climate fiction in our own time results in readers identifying with the story, or that the story is any good. There are certainly well-written and engaging climate fiction set in some barely recognizable future that still illuminates climate change. The question of effectiveness of books to educate and motivate readers toward climate change awareness and action is, in the end, a literary issue, just as the question of a book’s engaging qualities are a literary issue.

But one value in setting stories about climate change within a recognizable setting—our place and time now and the near future—is that the topic of climate change action can be explored and modelled from our current perspective. BTW, the short version of action modelling is: Vote for the right candidates who support the clean energy transition ASAP. Climate change is now seen as real by  large majorities, so the next step is to see the clean energy transition as not only progress against carbon emissions, but also as an economically beneficial energy system. Oh, and getting the right people in office to support the transition, to repeat myself.

Davin, the main through-character of the series, is still at a distance from climate issues in the first book, Kill Well, set in 2026. By 2029, in Dear Josephine, he’s paying more attention and has even joined Climate Covenant, a pro-climate progress candidate vetting organization. By 2035, in Over Brooklyn Hills (the book due this coming Spring), Davin is modestly tithing to Climate Covenant and Congress has been actively supporting clean energy progress through legislation. The books aren’t fairy tales, though. In 2035, fossil fuel interests are still playing hardball, protecting their profits at the expense of all, but hey, even Davin has rooftop solar and an EV. Unfortunately, another decade from now, climate change consequences are going to be exacting higher costs.

Written years ago, my first novel-length work—The Wall, a collection of inter-related stories sometimes called a short story cycle or story sequence or composite novel—presented snapshots of a post-nuclear apocalypse across time ranging from one month post-event to eight years post-event, each taking place in the same location but mainly with different characters per story, although there were some re-occurring characters, too. One impetus for that work was to counter the absurdist post-nuclear apocalypse works that had authors killing off millions merely to serve up survivalist fantasies. There was a rash of such survivalist works in the Reagan years, inspired, I imagine, by the increase in the nuclear threat of that time, not to mention the shifting focus and strength of the NRA.

While I am pretty sure that I’ve forgotten three-quarters of what I’d learned about the consequences of nuclear explosions over the many years working on The Wall, that learning was important to my effort to extrapolate as accurately as possible and so better imagine what it might be like for people in that situation. I was particularly interested in how different characters might feel, which is to say their psychological and emotional states. Imagining characters’ feelings, I believed, would be essential for understanding the conditions of their survival or whatever one might call such existence. Getting details right makes for a better story, too.

Writing The Steep Climes Quartet requires a similar effort to mount the learning curve, although in terms of climate change, not nuclear bombs. One thing that remains the same between my earlier writing and the work I’m currently engaged in is the effort toward realism. One part of the reality of climate change is the costs climate change exacts. As I wrote in 2023, “It is easy to ignore the prospect of a future drowned world when your feet are still dry, but when you realize, for instance, the cost of climate change for you today, you just might pay more attention.”

One can hope.