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.

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