Is climate change ripe for fiction? Yes! Because story.
The
debate is over. Climate change is real, and it's affecting millions of lives on
a daily basis.
The
changes are subtle. Rain is falling harder, more often, and in greater amounts.
Heat records break every day, in summer and in winter. It's easy though, to
ignore the changes with a stronger umbrella or a thinner winter coat.
What
about a decade from now, or a century, or a millennium?
That's
where storytelling comes in. As a writer of speculative fiction, I'm interested
in how humans will adapt to a new world where average temperatures are as many
as six degrees above the historical average, according to current scientific
predictions. Even predictions on the low end will likely result in massive
disruptions of life on planet Earth, including human life.
In Tales
From A Warming Planet, a series I've written with climate change as a main
theme, human beings live, grow, and fight, as they always have, but in a
different environment. This month, I released the first story in the series,
titled The Mother Earth Insurgency. It's a novelette of 15,000 words, a
kind of preview of my series of three novels. The Mother Earth Insurgency
is available now free from Instafreebie
through August 31, 2017. (Availability may be extended due to demand.)
In The
Mother Earth Insurgency, Nick Sorrows is an agent of the Bureau of
Environmental Security who infiltrates a terrorist group fighting what it
believes is the corporate takeover of “green” energy, such as wind farms and
solar farms. The BES is tasked with protecting the planet from environmental
harm, somewhat like the FBI, but with darker methods. As Nick pursues his
mission, he discovers a major action planned by the group, led by an
ex-environmental lawyer named Jon Janicks. The action could kill Sorrows' young
son. Can Nick save his son and thousands more from certain death?
All my
stories in the Tales series fit into the dystopia and thriller genres,
with a heavy dose of science fiction. (Sorry, no spaceships or ray guns.) I've
focused on strong characters, particularly female characters. In the first
novel, Carbon Run, scheduled for release in September, Anne Penn is a
young woman whose father is accused of destroying an endangered species. After
her father disappears, Anne accompanies another BES agent, Janine Kilel, to
find her father. More strong female lead characters appear in upcoming Tales novels, including City of Ice and Dreams,
and Restoration.
A few
commentators place these kinds of stories in a new genre, “climate fiction.” The
genre's history goes back decades, and today's practitioners include Kim
Stanley Robinson, Margaret Atwood, and Barbara Kingsolver. The canon is
expanding all the time.
More and
more writers are asking: How will we live in a climate-changed world? My work
is a small, hopefully entertaining, answer to the question. I hope you'll go
along for the journey.
