One persistent challenge that I faced in writing Kill Well was keeping up with climate change realities. There were a number of times over the several years of manuscript work when I had to update climate consequences.

A case in point was my having to expand the incidents of large wildfires, even if only as one of many “background” news reports in the characters’ lives. In the writing of Kill Well—or for that matter, the other three books of The Steep Climes Quartet—it is important to me not to exaggerate climate change effects simply for the sake of drama. In fact, my concern is to not embellish the consequences of climate change and to stay well clear of one of the prevailing characteristics of apocalyptic stories found in much climate fiction. The reason for my avoiding climate apocalypse in this fiction series is simple enough, and that is to have the world of the books be recognizable by my readers in their own experiences. Mad Max-like worlds where one scrambles to find cans of beans while fighting off desert refugees or warlords of drowned cities is not today’s common climate change experience.

In climate apocalypse stories the message about climate change is abstract and at a remove from one’s personal experience, where the “one” here represents the target for the books, which is readers of the Global North, and more specifically yet, mainly Americans. The lack of situational applicability of climate apocalypse stories makes it less likely that the reader will directly identify in his or her or xer own life what climate change means in this present hour. I’m not arguing here against climate apocalypse stories—there are many that are entertaining and thought-provoking—but I am arguing that such stories may do little to help readers acknowledge their own present reality of climate change.

However, the problem I keep running into while I write this series is that the pace of climate change keeps superseding my own efforts to not exaggerate, and, indeed, it can feel like I am in a race to publish quickly enough to keep my fictional world in step with the real world. Avoiding overplaying climate change effects turns out to be a bigger challenge than exaggerating such effects, and that’s really no surprise with the ever-increasing news reports about high temperature averages in many spots across the globe, or of growing numbers of 100-Year storms, or giant wildfires ravaging many places in both hemispheres. These climate events keep threatening to move past my picture of the present world and so obscure the effects of climate change I want the reader to better understand.

What I want to present, what doesn’t get enough attention, is the present and growing economic consequences of climate change, at least in the American middle-class. The solutions to climate change—as limited and long term as they may be—involve great cost and significant sacrifice for us all. The poor among us already know that they are screwed and may have some sense that climate change effects will hit them the hardest. The American middle class in the main, however, remains unaware that climate change is bringing more economic pressure to bear and for as many years as we are likely to forecast. Of course, this same American middle class (and, unfortunately, some chunk of the working and poverty classes) has largely managed to remain unaware of how the American economy, as defined through changes in law over the last several decades, has shifted massive amounts of wealth to the top ten percentile and the corporations that are led by them, so whether or not climate change can become a matter of attention is anyone’s guess.

But if the majority of us refuse to acknowledge the connection between income inequality and climate solutions, a major part of the costs for climate solutions will fall on this same majority, even as the pace of solutions will be slower. Today, our political environment still works towards continuing this inequitable sharing of the country’s leaps in productivity, and without greatly expanded political attention by the bottom ninety percentile, climate solutions will be retarded, and the cost will be an unfairly higher burden for most of us.

That’s the interesting story of the next couple of decades, to see if American Democracy is up to the challenge of climate change. Well, that, and the inexorable storms, fires, heatwaves, and floods heading our way and already here.