When I started writing back in 2015 what has become The Steep Climes Quartet series, I was recovering from rotator cuff surgery and had three-plus months when the use of my shoulder was restricted, but I could sit at my keyboard and type. I was interested in writing a book that would offset the deficit I found in many climate fiction novels, which was the tendency to create apocalyptic scenarios—drowned worlds, burnt worlds, post-apocalyptic survivor worlds. There are some entertaining and good—even great—books of this sort, but I was concerned that many such books did little to make climate change real to readers. After all, most of us (in the developed nations, anyway) don’t find ourselves wandering hellscapes in search of the last gun and girl or paddling around among sunken buildings for cans of beans or climbing aboard spaceships to head for pristine planets for a new start. This last type of climate change fiction—the planetary escape—I find especially maddening since it is based on an absurd premise, which is that things can get so bad on Earth that going elsewhere makes sense. I mean, come on, if we can design environmental systems to keep breathable atmospheres effective for interplanetary or interstellar travel or come up with technology for terraforming, we can more easily and effectively apply these technologies on Earth where the atmosphere is designed for us and where we don’t have to escape the gravity well. I guess, though, staying Earthbound and working on our environment isn’t as much fun as building spaceships and dreaming of hyper sleep and faster than light propulsion or balancing the delicate requirements of generation ship ecologies.
Still, I don’t mean to suggest that climate fiction works that project into mid- and far-term futures can’t be excellent. I m a huge fan of Paolo Bacigalupi ever since reading The Windup Girl and I read everything he publishes and recommend his work widely. Of course, the work of Kim Stanley Robinson is outstanding, and his recent novel, The Ministry of the Future, is rightly considered the seminal climate fiction work, as new as this book is. Robinson (or “Stan” as I’ve learned to reference him in my video viewing of many of his excellent interviews, lectures, and panel discussions) has emerged not only as one of the best thinkers about climate change solutions but also one of the most effective public voices about global warming.
Sometimes climate fiction emerges from unexpected sources, whether through traditional trade publishing or self-publishing, and just one recent example is J. Underwood’s The Bell Lap, while another is The Light Pirate, by Lily Brooks-Dalton. By the way, a great place to follow what is happening in climate fiction is Literary Hub, where Amy Brady has been tracking the blossoming genre quite effectively. There is a large and growing body of climate fiction and many in this body are impressive efforts.
So, why I am trying to add yet another climate fiction book—or, in my case, a series—when there is already a large number of such books? The Steep Climes Quartet aims to create a world that is recognizable to regular Americans, and while I am less confident with other countries, I’ll still claim relevance to other developed Western nations. Most of us are still dealing with the climate crisis at a remove—news stories, a bad storm, or when smoke gets in our eyes. Most of us don’t appreciate how much we are already caught up in the climate crisis as we remain intent on not considering how this affects us in our daily lives.
When I started this work, I had thought that it would be a challenge to keep from over-exaggerating the present effects of climate change, but it turns out the challenge has been to keep ahead of climate change effects that are entering history on a seemingly daily basis. This balancing act is especially difficult in the first book, Kill Well, which takes place only two or three years from the present day, and there have been times when I’ve had to revise the manuscript because the reality of climate change consequences kept getting ahead of the book.
The series has characters that come and go across the books, but with the central character always centering the series in Berkshire County in Massachusetts, a constant location through which a longitudinal sense of the effects of climate change can be presented. The Northeast, and mid-New England in particular, is considered in most climate change modelling as a more resilient and less likely catastrophe-prone area in terms of climate change, at least if you exclude sea level areas. But even in so-called resilient areas, the effects of climate change are significant and grow ever more intrusive.
How would people who find themselves in places with less direct climate-related destruction think of climate change? This series is an attempt to answer this question by offering entertaining stories—even page-turners, hopefully—while providing a well-considered appreciation of the personal consequences of climate change, including costs, politics, and one’s own responsibility. The effects of climate change already being experienced is the right starting point for preparing a roadmap of the further pain and triumphs in our future. Climate change-related challenges—even for the relatively fortunate—will be increasingly difficult and costly, but over the span of the series, progress to ameliorate the effects and causes of climate change is being made, and the series offers hope that the hard work and choices ahead of us can bring change will be may be widely and successfully embraced.
Not that The Steep Climes Quartet is pollyannish or even on balance optimistic. I have little reason to believe that human nature will change radically, even while we need a radical alteration in our relationship to our environment to reduce the severity of—and, yes, even potentially apocalyptic—global warming. Unfortunately, the current human perception of climate change is the same way we homo sapiens perceive other existential challenges, which is not much at all unless the particular existential threat happens to be standing on our heads.
Capitalism, neo-liberal or otherwise, has helped foster global warming. There is the possibility that capitalism could be helpful in meeting the climate challenge in the motive to protect against catastrophically lost capital, and this dynamic is explored in the series. Still, any sudden “Come to Jesus” moment on our part feels improbable, and our economic culture’s habit of thinking in terms of the next quarter’s results is hardly conducive for long-term planning of the changes we need. Our politics are also not likely to shift, at least in the near-term, although one can, of course, hope for improvement in the body politic, but hopeful or not, politics is becoming ever-increasingly important for real solutions. Even in the face of positive climate amelioration, there has been already enough damage done that significant suffering is unavoidable, even for the developed nations that have so far been willing enough to let others take the brunt of climate disasters. Nevertheless, we know that climate amelioration is being made and we can confidently expect that there is much more to come. The Steep Climes Quartet imagines the balance of progress and delay across time from the perspective of those with resources and infrastructure to have much of their own population weather the coming storm better than others, but not without exacting a cost that grows bigger over time.
Taking place two or three years from our present day, the first book in the series, Kill Well, uses a thriller-like plot of the murder of a fossil fuel divestment activist to structure the story of the effects of climate change. Climate change consequences are still subtle for the most part in the Berkshires, mostly manifesting in terms of higher prices both directly and indirectly (think externalities), whether for food, or insurance, or cost of energy. This last cost category—energy—is one that the climate change amelioration folk (and I count myself among such) has to date poorly addressed, to the detriment of our efforts overall to engage the most people in the discussion about how our nation and our world can tackle the challenge.
The second book in the series, Dear Josephine, taking place six years from now, tackles the topic of climate change cost messaging, although the main structural element of the story is the destruction of a major U.S. population center from a strong hurricane (investment advice: don’t buy real estate on the Gold Coast!). There are plot threads involving the murders of extremely wealthy people and the mixed motives behind the seemingly simple message about income inequality. There is also assassination, extortion, and other foul deeds on the part of moneyed interests in a play for budget control of a huge infrastructure multi-decades-long project defined by still-developing congressional activity. Readers see some of these plot lines intersecting with the Berkshires and some of the characters.
The third book in The Steep Climes series, Over Brooklyn Hills, takes place a dozen years from now and looks at climate migration by addressing it writ small, with young urbanites escaping the increasingly hot New York City summers by coming to the Berkshires, even while also on the global scale with mass migrations leading to armed conflicts that hurt the economic and emotional capacity of many Americans, including these young hipsters. “Us versus Them” becomes more unescapable as competition for resources grows, whether it’s the rash of Airbnb conversions and local housing shortages and spikes in shoplifting and petty crimes in the relative green hills of the Berkshires or the basic food and water needs of those driven from increasingly inhospitable regions of the world.
The last book of the series, Farm to Me, takes place twenty-one years after the start of the series and looks at the issue of aging relative to the demands and stresses of climate change. This book also explores shifts back toward local economies, and especially in food production. Farms in the Berkshires and the Northeast are expanding because of the drought-stricken deterioration of major U.S. food producers, the environmental and financial cost of food transportation, and the rise in regenerative agricultural practices. The main plot line involves the effort to control regional food distribution, where the increasing reliance on local farms means there are new business opportunities for those criminal enough to seize upon.
Back in 2015, the first full draft of what was then titled The Troubles, ran over 180,000 word count and in one of my first shares (with a friend and colleague who worked at the time for Tony Fadell’s Nest start-up), it was suggested that I had too many plot lines and enough stories for four or five books. And when I say that this was “suggested” to me, the better term of use might be “dope-slapped,” but whichever, this was good advice. The rewriting of the first book of this new series got supercharged with the advent of Covid and the manuscript for the second book in the series also had the first draft mostly written then, too.
And then I was back to work and the rewriting slowed. But the first book manuscript is now through production and will release this September, with Book Two, Dear Josephine, on track for early 2024.