I want to write climate fiction within which people can see themselves. What I don’t want to do with this series is to add to the already over-crowded pool of climate apocalypse novels that take place in future drowned or desert worlds we can’t correlate to our real lives. There are some great future climate fiction novels and stories, don’t get me wrong. Unfortunately, there is also a lot of climate fiction that falls into the “Fun with Apocalypse” approach, where, like many post-nuclear apocalypse stories from decades ago, these novels are all about getting the guns and the girl.

The fact is that the signs of and fallouts from global warming are already part of our experience and there is more—much more—to come. But even if we escape for some fortunate length of time the heatwaves or fires or storms that increasingly appear in this wide world, we can’t escape the consequences of international, national, and local politics or the unsettling effects on the world economy. Nor can we avoid the increasing distress in our own families and households, with climate change already at work in our lives in the size of our energy bills, the rising prices for food, and, of course, the ceaseless news-scape of disasters closing in. None can escape the demands and costs for correcting the errant path of centuries of carbon-dumping because doing nothing guarantees a yet much higher cost.

The personal price of climate change and how economic struggles and the cost of living will increase for us means that we must pay attention to political actions, which means that we must vote, and vote for those who understand the present struggles and are open about the struggles ahead of us. I believe that this also means that we must vote for those who pursue the best tax and tax credit policies. The technology and funds are there for clean energy infrastructure buildout, not that the going will be easy or untroubled. Any and all significant progress, however, will demand massive public engagement. We need to rid ourselves of politicians who are in the pocket of Big Oil for the necessary change to meet the climate crisis.

The Steep Climes Quartet surveys the climate crisis coming toward us today and in the years and decades ahead, focusing on the experience of these troubled times and the thoughts and feelings and choices of the series’ main characters caught up in the climate crisis. Kill Well blends thriller genre with the literary style of deep character development to build—in my most fervent hope, anyway—page-turners that help us imagine what we might be thinking now and in the years ahead about climate change and choices we each face.

The category this book falls into is climate fiction, although you won’t see this as a browse path in Amazon Books yet. Still, the genre is having its day, and no wonder about that. The Climate crisis is the existential crisis of our times—and of our children’s and grandchildren’s and their grandchildren’s times—and climate change should be showing up in every novel and short story being written about today and tomorrow (this is hardly an original thought on my part; Omar El-Akkad is the best-known proponent of this view).

I started what has become The Steep Climes Quartet in 2015, breaking the concept into a series thereafter, and now the first book, Kill Well, is out and about. Here are a couple of links to find the book: Amazon or Draft2Digital.

Kill Well is the first book of the series and takes place more or less today and in one particular spot in America, Berkshire County, which lies at the western end of Massachusetts, a location thought likely to miss much of the very worst effects of climate change for longer than many other places in our fragile world. In Kill Well, as readers meet Berkshire denizens, one singular danger comes to the green hills of the Berkshires in the form of fossil fuel capitalists buying the deaths of divestiture activists all for the sake of protecting profits.