Well, for accuracy’s sake, only Kill Well (Book One) and Dear Josephine (Book Two) of The Steep Climes Quartet, are published (well, Dear Josephine shortly to be this Spring), while Over Brooklyn Hills (Book Three) is targeted for Fall 2024 and Farm to Me (Book Four) aims for Spring 2025, but who knows, really, since both Book Three and Book Four are in varying states of draft manuscripts and notes.
Here’s an attempt to describe the what and why of The Steep Climes Quartet, a literary climate fiction thriller series that follows several Berkshire residents as they react to the effects of climate change across the span of nearly three decades. Kill Well takes place a couple of years from now; Dear Josephine begins in 2029; Over Brooklyn Hills in 2035, and the final book, Farm to Me, takes place in 2047.
The theme of the series is our fractured society and the solidarity climate progress requires of us. The climate change science, technologies, and politics in the books are grounded in long-term and in-depth study and reject the needlessly gratuitous exaggeration for the realistic extrapolation. This climate crisis future is terrifying enough, after all, but it is a future that also remains open to our own agency and the potential in working together toward solutions.
Most climate fiction focuses on the multitude of climate disasters and apocalypses and the struggle of individuals against storms, actual and metaphorical. These types of stories can be entertaining, but they typically fail to help the reader identify with the reader’s own reality of near-and mid-term futures, when action—especially political—can rewrite our climate’s future.
What I seek to capture in The Steep Climes Quartet is the condition of American society in our present moment and the lack of connection among us. There is the political polarization of Reds and Blues and the strong contrasts and conflicts of racial, ethnic, religious, and cultural identities. Our nation suffers from record-high rates of depression, including in our young. There’s a far too present sense of isolation pushed by the widespread failures of social institutions. America is now the land of economic stress for the majority of Americans, even while there’s the corresponding absurd gulf of income and wealth for the few. There’s a general sense that something is wrong, with causes aplenty.
And, of course, one clear and present anxiety manifesting in the last several years is climate change and the all-too-often unanswered question we ask ourselves: What can we do?
Kill Well finds the main character Davin—the principal through character across the series and would-be artist who also works with a local online interactive “newspaper”—feeling like a lot of us these days, worried about money, divorced, and, post-Covid, still rusty with connecting to others all the while the sense of the climate crisis sometimes acutely rises from the background hum of bad news. There is a thriller aspect in Kill Well that acutely rises too, and this part of the story brings to sharp relief the battle of short-term greed and entrenched economic power against the increasingly obvious need to work collectively to reduce the threat of the growing human carbon footprint.
Dear Josephine brings that need home in the devastation of Miami and the Gold Coast from an unprecedented hurricane that leaves millions of people displaced, while the thriller aspect here is found in political operations and dirty work to control huge climate amelioration budgets and fossil fuel subsidies, even as public protests grow violent and strange murders become front page news under the claim, Kill the Rich. Davin is seeing more clearly how personal connections bring more meaning to his life and to his growing sense that he too must be active in the fight for climate progress.
Over Brooklyn Hills, a decade or so after the first book, looks at climate migration writ large and small and whether addressing the needs of others is essential for any sort of progress even as we so easily succumb to the Us versus Them mentality that can paralyze political solidarity and resist positive action. There are major population migration conflicts in various areas of the world as climate change wreaks havoc, including on our southern border, and here in the Berkshires there’s an explosion of young urbanites seeking relief from increasingly unbearable city summers, but unwelcomed challenges come north with them. Davin’s own societal obligations come face-to-face with the county’s urge to defend what’s theirs and while he’d rather be working in his studio, he has to pick a side.
Farm to Me adds another dozen years post-Over Brooklyn Hills, and the longer-term consequences of climate change are more and more intrusive. Significant chronic droughts have handicapped much of America’s western food production areas, but local farms in the Berkshires and the Northeast are helping to compensate. Davin, now well on in years but still making art, has limited involvement with Tri-Interactive, but one young writer he’s mentoring ends up dead under suspicious circumstances when she’s looking into a story about local food distribution mergers. Is life, even in times of crisis, always a matter of just business?
As the series progresses, the reader sees the ebb and flow of political actions and the efficacy of climate progress efforts, as well as the ongoing challenges of climate change in a world where Net Zero keeps slipping into the future. Can political solidarity for climate progress carry the day?