“Eco-fiction feels to me like the most important thing I could be writing right now.”
This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here.
Most of my books have elements of surrealism or sci-fi or the fantastic—the passenger pigeons mysteriously return, or a character has the power of knowing when people will die—but I really committed in my last book, the eco-fiction heist Barn 8, when I swerved twenty thousand years ahead into an apocalyptic tomorrow. It felt so right that I knew that in my next book the future would be my journey. From the first sentence of my new novel, Earth 7, I was fully down for eco-speculative fiction—cli-fi, I’ve heard it called. I wanted to write about the various technological band-aids we’re coming up with to keep civilization going in the face of climate change. I thought I’d follow those technologies to their inevitable endpoints. What would earth look like after a few hundred years of solar-panel arrays, wind turbines, carbon capture, stratospheric geoengineering?
I placed the story in the future, changed the setting, and I let the ripples of that choice spill over everything around it. The tone, the language, the characters, the plot, the problems, the images, even the air and light and the furniture in the rooms—they all shifted and reoriented, like going to another continent and seeing a new sky full of different stars.
