What the Apocalypse Reveals: The Illuminating Power of Climate Fiction

Your most recent book, The Light Pirate, spans the course of a main character’s lifetime as she navigates a Florida rocked by environmental catastrophe. How did you reckon with time as you were writing this novel? What led you to place the timeline of a human life within the much longer lifespan of an ecosystem?

I think that part of our species’ great struggle to see, reckon with, and address the climate crisis is bound up in the very limited clock of a human lifetime. We aren’t able to fully experience the problem within the much broader ecological timeline, and any potential solution is equally outside of our own individual experience. So where does that leave us? How do we bridge the gap between the briefness of our human experience and the gradual implosion of our environment? The idea of making sacrifices now in order to caretake future generations has been shockingly ineffective. For me, using speculative fiction to pair the arc of a human life with the arc of an ecosystem profoundly unraveling was a way to get at that problem.

The book really exists in the tension between staying and going. By imagining a future where Florida has been deemed uninhabitable, you explore how various characters make choices whether to relocate or remain and witness the unraveling of home as they know it. How did you approach these decisions in your characters? 

I wanted to show a range of reactions, and to try to honor them all equally. To not assign value to one over the other. The reality of having to choose between staying in an inhospitable place and leaving behind your home is hopelessly messy, right? There is no easy answer there. Some of the characters choose to stay and some choose to leave, and no one is right or wrong about that. What is possible for one character isn’t possible for another.

In thinking about what prompted you to write The Light Pirate, you said, “The question that this book is posing, the question that I’m curious about is, what if the worst did happen? What if this crisis is as terrible and full of grief as we fear it will be? …What if the end of the world as we know it included the opportunity to build the world that we need?” How does climate fiction let you explore the space between those questions? 

For me, it’s important to look squarely at the worst case scenarios. I would rather look under the bed and see the monster than lie awake in terror, waiting to see if it will come for me. And in doing that kind of looking, I think there is an opportunity—to move through the layers of instinctual fear responses, into the acceptance of an excruciating reality, and then maybe beyond, into a “well, now what” mentality. As a civilization we are desperately hanging onto this way of life that is frankly not sustainable. But what if we let it go and allowed ourself to exist in that horrifying in-between in order to create space to make something new? What if the only way we’re able to let it go everything that isn’t working is if it’s forcibly yanked away from us? What if the worst thing happening can also be part of the necessary thing happening? This is very much the playground of climate fiction. There is so much nuance and contradiction here to unpack, it’s never simple, but that is what makes it such a rich space for storytelling.

You’ve written, “My understanding of peace is that it never arrives alone. Without the company of chaos or conflict, peace is only an abstraction, thin and vaporous. Peace exists most fully in the center of the storm, wrapped in furious winds, held together by discord, and made tangible in terrible, beautiful contrast.” As you think about our environmental future, both in terms of your own life and the lives of your characters, what do you imagine peace might look like? 

I am repeating myself a little here, but I think peace will look like accepting that things have to fundamentally change and then being open to the inherent difficulties of changing them. I think that the concept of peace is borne of loss and conflict. Our understanding of peace has grown and will continue to grow in the shadow of reckoning with its absence.

The views and opinions of the author are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Aspen Institute.

By Maya Kobe-Rundio, Digital Editor and Producer, Aspen Ideas