Once upon a time (and this isn’t a fable), the news was generally considered to be coverage of actual events, the populace agreed on the concept of an objective truth, and no one other than a few philosophers spent much time wondering about what was real and what wasn’t. None of this was much of a problem for fiction writers, because we know that our job is to create a world that feels real and to make up events that could have happened and people who might exist, but we also know we have to shut down the computer and go do the real world, where the boss is getting cranky and the dog just threw up on the kitchen floor.
But, for a number of very complicated reasons best left to psychiatrists and sociologists to explain, truth became subjective. My truth became conflated with the truth, and in the course of promoting the value of my truth, your truth came to be called if not a lie, then certainly of lesser value. Binary thinking crept into the culture like a virus and spread. News outlets and social media suited up for one team or the other, thus exacerbating the sense that everything could…and should…be viewed as either/or. The Age of Dichotomous Thinking was born.
This either/or paradigm works nicely for genre novels, in which there’s a protagonist—generally the “good guy”—and an antagonist who is the “bad guy”. The good guy, in climate fiction, is probably trying to save him/herself and others from some disaster brought on by climate change or else trying to stop the bad guy from doing something that is going to bring further harm to the environment. As for who gets to tell the story of what really happens: we’re comfortable with that as well. It’s the narrator. We get to have unreliable narrators, so we are already savvy about the whole business of lying and fake news.
For this writer, however, a structure that reflects dichotomous thinking didn’t feel right, especially when it came to writing my upcoming novel Little Great Island, a novel about the impact of climate change on a small island community in Maine.
By personality (and thanks to a few decades of therapy), I’m more of a both/and person than an either/or person, and so I didn’t want to limit my story to a protagonist/antagonist structure. There are a lot of people in community, and all of them have different values and needs that I wanted to have lead to conflict once one character decided to sell his property. As I went through draft after draft, I realized that the story couldn’t be constrained to “good” vs. “bad” because some characters—like Frank Clatcher, the island’s most successful businessman—wants a “bad” thing (a development that would negatively impact the island’s ecosystem) for “good” reasons: his business is threatened by sea level rise and he desperately needs income to support his family. Arguably, he could be called greedy or selfish, but he’s also a father and a soon-to-be grandfather wanting what’s best for his loved ones. The nominal good guy (or woman as the case may be), is Mari McGavin, a native islander who wants a farm on the same land the developer is after. She desperately needs money to fight for custody of her son, and farming is the only real option open to her, but she also wants to create a working model that demonstrates alternatives for the community as the lobster fishing collapses. Then there’s the retired statesman and long-time summer resident on the island who wants the land put in a conservation trust—a desire ecologically minded people can rally behind, but putting land into a conservation trust takes it off the tax rolls, making it that much harder for the year-round population to pay for the services they want and need. In the midst of all these conflicting needs and desires is Harry Richardson, whose land it actually is, who doesn’t really know what he wants or needs because he’s lost in a fog of grief after losing his wife to cancer.
Ultimately, all these characters—plus more—got their own voice and arc in Little Great Island. The result was the kind of unmitigated cacophony characteristic of social media in an election year. I needed a more defined point of view to carry the plot, but who? What voice got to be loudest?
I chose first to focus on the symbiotic relationship between the year-round population and the summer visitors, thereby giving Mari and Harry more of a voice (e.g., more pages and a stronger plot arc than other point-of-view characters). Any other community member who got his or her own point-of-view chapter had to have a vision of Little Great Island’s future that wasn’t consistent with either Mari’s or Harry’s, thus bringing social justice into the story. To reduce the noise, their chapters were limited to three or four pages. I wanted each of these voices to have an ethically, legally, and morally legitimate reason for wanting what they want for the future of Little Great Island, because even though I have my own strongly held beliefs about behaviors and attitudes that lead to continued destruction of the environment (and even as I acknowledge that I act against my own beliefs more often than I like to admit), I recognize that most people don’t wake up in the morning longing to be destructive. I suspect that obliviousness or the need to survive and/or protect loved ones underlies climate damage more frequently than evil. Even greed isn’t perceived as greedy by those who practice it; they have their own justification—frequently rooted in fear— for why they need more. To put it in terms of fiction craft, I needed to ensure I was creating three-dimensional characters, and so each of them needed a motivation. Right around then, I realized an effective metaphor for what I was doing was playing 3D chess in the dark…and I don’t know how to play chess.
As I juggled my ten separate points of view, I realized I’d made the worst mistake humans make when it comes to talking about climate change: I’d focused exclusively on the humans. One very important voice was missing—that of the island itself—and so I interspersed short omniscient sections throughout the book. These sections pay homage to the bugs and the birds, the trees and the bracken, the fog and the odors of saltwater and summer, to the lobster from the moment of conception to the threat of extinction, and to the eons of life this planet lived before any of us had a prayer of living here.
On Little Great Island, as the conflicting visions of the island’s future take hold, the fragile balance between the island’s native population and summer visitors fractures. Only when tragedy strikes can the community reunite and find a way forward, and therein lies the cautionary note common to climate fiction: please, let’s all come to our senses before it’s too late. Binary thinking is nonsensical in climate conversations. This isn’t my planet. It isn’t your planet. It’s our planet.
Kate Woodworth is the author of Racing Into the Dark (EP Dutton) and the forthcoming Little Great Island (Sibylline Press, May 2025). Her short stories have been published in Quarterly West, Cimarron Review, Shenandoah, and others. She lives outside Boston.
Solutions Spotlight
Today, Renan Bernardo shares an extract from his story collection, Different Kinds of Defiance, which shows a climate solution in action.
I decided to call my series which engages throughout all five books with the issue of climate change, “Until This Last.” The title was based on John Ruskin’s essay Unto This Last in which he looks, among other things, at the destructive effects of industrialism upon the natural world. Ruskin’s essay had a lasting impact on both me and on Ghandi. Ghandi changed his life based on Ruskin’s ideas and as a result created the Phoenix Settlement. The Phoenix Settlement comprised of 100 acres of land which he purchased in 1904 in South Africa. It was on this Settlement that Gandhi started his journey of transforming from a successful lawyer to a human being with a passion for liberation, nonviolence, and spirituality. Ruskin based his essay on this quote from the Bible below. Friend, I do thee no wrong. Didst not thou agree with me for a penny? Take that thine is, and go thy way. I will give unto this last even as unto thee. If ye think good, give me my price; And if not, forbear. So they weighed for my price thirty pieces of silver. Matthew 20:13 and Zechariah 11:12 respectively (in the King James Version) One of the main things which helped me write my science fiction series is that throughout my life I have been what I call a “spectator”. I have travelled around the world and lived as a foreigner in many countries. However, I often feel as if I am a foreigner in America, the place that I have called home for the past fifty years. I think that this sense of “other” I live with, is something I draw on in my writing, especially when I describe extra planetary worlds and characters. Every country I’ve visited and lived in, has provided a different set of barriers and opportunities that the people who lived there had to function within. I try and bring my experience of these differences into my writing. I have never liked the understood definition of science fiction and how everything from futuristic fantasy to writing based on science is all classified as being the same. I am a fiction author who takes research into the science I use in my books extremely seriously. I believe science is an essential tool very few of us use to understand ourselves and the world we live in. Kurt Vonnegut once said: 'I have been a sore headed occupant of a file drawer labeled "science fiction" ... and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.” Despite what Vonnegut so accurately observed, I gladly chose to be in the so-called urinal of science fiction. Beside wanting to include various theories from biology, chemistry, and theoretical physics in my books, I am passionate about the existential drama of climate change and how it might play out in the future. In addition to researching the science of energy and global warming, I have come to understand that we cannot address global warming under an economic system which encourages consumption, and which is hostile to the health of the planet. I have also researched the dangers of geoengineering, an emerging technology that is used to manipulate the climate. Here Sophie (female wisdom) one of my main characters in what became the first book in the series, The Burning Years, explains its potential consequences. “When I took on my government position, after I graduated from University, the “Weather Wars” were in full force. The United States had been investing in HAARP (The High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program) since 1960 and had moved it from Alaska to an underground facility, Area 52, in the Nevada desert, where its scientists worked on research that would enable us to continue to geo-engineer the weather. By 2030 they had developed in that facility a way to push and relocate weather and, as climate change happened, they believed they could ensure our national survival by redirecting extreme weather events meant for us into various parts of the world. Then other developed countries began to tinker with the weather as well, which set off massive droughts everywhere. While we had international environmental agreements, as the impending cataclysm approached, countries panicked. That’s how the “Weather Wars” started. In 2045, because we were all trying to save ourselves from the effects of climate change, treaties and agreements between countries became obsolete as conventional weapons were now useless. Carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases had risen to such an extent into the atmosphere around the globe that they had formed a thick blanket holding in heat. As these heat-trapping gas concentrations increased, the blanket’s thickness also increased and trapped even more heat in our lower atmosphere. Heat that had been designed by nature to escape through the stratosphere was now no longer able to do so, and resulted in it being much cooler than it should have been. This abnormal coolness then contributed to ozone loss, which effectively cancelled out any progress we had made in the past, by reducing CFC’s. Like us, most developed countries didn’t care what happened in other parts of the world and were using any number of untested methods to reduce the effects of regional climate change. These methods included blocking a portion of the sun’s rays; fertilizing nearby oceans with iron to pull carbon out of the atmosphere; covering their land with vast sheets of white plastic, making them look like snowfields, to reflect sunlight back into space; and building machines that could suck carbon out of the air. We, in the United States, led the pack and after I joined DARPA, my job was to control the giant space mirrors in place in the ionosphere. We were brightening clouds above the Earth, and spraying seawater into the sky with cannons to make more clouds. We’d also stolen Tesla’s resonance theories and were sending sonic pulsars up into the atmosphere. The pulsars caused volcanoes to spew out Sulphur dioxide, which would supposedly increase our cloud cover, but ended up on top of everything else causing earthquakes and tidal waves, inadvertently wiping out large parts of our land, including Florida and the West Coast. In my heart, I knew what we were really doing, all of us together, was causing our ‘mother,’ Gaia, to go crazy, as we played out the final scenario of the Industrial Revolution during which we had somehow believed we could tame nature and make it our own. ‘Solar Radiation Management,’ as we called it euphemistically in our department, would fail in the long term to cool our continental landmass. And, as we engineered what we called ‘global dimming,’ we drove away our blue skies and all we saw now was white above us, like an unremitting autumnal fog so that at night we could no longer see the moon or the stars. The ‘ones in the know,’ the elite in all the countries, understood the tiny particles of Sulphur we had been putting into the atmosphere for years, would eventually deplete the radiation shield from our planet. Because they knew what others didn’t, these elite were preparing their underground cities where they, their children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren would live until years into the future, when their descendants could re-emerge, like mole-people, onto an Earth’s surface that was perhaps beginning to heal. Many of these ‘elites’ including our politicians, were the same ones who had been responsible in the first place for causing the methane leaks, using extra-dirty coal, creating tar sand deposits, and turning a blind eye to the massive spillage of natural gas from their gargantuan projects. To add fuel to this destructive fire we had started, in 2050 we also caused the Arctic to finally all but melt away, and in doing so inadvertently released several pre-historic viruses that had been trapped for millions of years under the perma-frost. The release of these viruses caused the deaths of millions of the poor and disenfranchised, who were not allowed access to the limited, expensive, and hastily developed vaccines controlled by private pharmaceutical companies. Now, ten years after I joined DARPA, in the year 2060, it was the right time for me to be exactly where I was. My husband, Peter, and I had the ability to use any information we obtained at our jobs for the construction of a survivalist community we were building on the great underground Ogallala Aquifer. This Aquifer stretches from Nebraska into Texas. Most of its southern parts had gone dry by 2025, but the water in the deepest regions of it, starting in Nebraska, has miraculously remained the same………………….. Because Alistair has been thoroughly briefed on the actions that Peter had taken to sabotage the Web and the servers that held vital information on the two trans-humans, he knows Peter is now considered an Enemy of the State and a dangerous fugitive. It is only just recently, though, he has learned how Sophie released a powerful, intelligent, self-aware computer virus before her departure, one that completely crippled the weather geoengineering program. She, too, is now wanted by the authorities. Since his own research in climate change has led him to believe Earth’s protective layer will slowly readjust and calibrate itself in time, Alistair agrees with Sophie’s actions and her opinion that the planet needs a chance to heal itself without help or interference from human agencies. Although the natural ‘calibration’ of Earth will probably not happen for hundreds of years, he continues to hope his great grandchildren will once again be able to live safely on the surface of a newly rejuvenated planet.” *** Despite wanting to introduce a lot of complex scientific concepts into my books, I knew at the core of them I wanted to ask the question - what does it mean to be human? Is the way we treat each other the most important thing about us? As a writer I wanted to create a speculative drama based on theoretical science in which humanistic events such as love, loss and self-discovery are played out. I believe human beings in isolation are meaningless and I strongly support the idea of the human collective and know that we will emerge or fail as a race together. However, if we don’t soon understand how we are all connected to each other and the planet on which we live, even though we might be a civilization that has so far survived for thousands of years, this will not save us. As a creative artist I have also always realized that something else was going on outside me that I could tap into. Something that exists in what I call “the universal field.” As Jung would say: “My thesis then, is as follows: in addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix), there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents.” Quantum Mechanics unlike classical physics allowed me to understand this universal field of Spiritus Mundi or collective consciousness in quite simple terms. By filling what is called a causal gap, quantum mechanics shows that for knowledge to advance in all fields the observer must first decide what the question is to be. My belief and experience as a creative artist is that our brains grab those questions out of universal consciousness, allowing it to have a causal effect on our world. QM and my own experiences tell me that the minute we bring those questions into the physical realm and create a collapse of wave function (e.g. for me it would be ideas into novels, short stories and poetry, for a physicist it would be a new mathematical formula), important new knowledge is produced. By regularly exercising the creative right brain and making sure it is communicating well with the logical left brain on a regular basis, I believe one changes the structure of the whole brain permanently, and one also changes the way one processes information going forward in life. I think creative people in all fields therefore decide what questions they will ask out of a huge realm of possibilities. If one took this idea further perhaps nature/universe/cosmos has intended that human beings have been given the biological technology (brain) to interact perfectly with the field of consciousness which surrounds us. Anyway Bohm the physicist and Jung the psychologist would have had much to discuss. I would have liked to have been a fly on the wall to hear that discussion. *** After completing all my research, I carefully chose the scientific theories, or the bones on which I would build my series of five books. After putting these in place, I started to develop my characters. To do so I read about future bionic humans who would be linked to the web through implants, about manipulating the human brain so false memories could be easily implanted, and about genetically engineered humans and clones. I also read many different genres of science fiction and finally decided on a Raiders of the Lost Ark adventure-style story that would be slightly dystopian. My characters, like my family, would come from multiple races and genders, and women would play major roles. Further I’d give some of the main characters the names of my four grandchildren so when they grew up, they’d have fun reading my books. These books would also be a way for me to transfer critical information from my generation to theirs. A way to store knowledge which they might need in the future. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is an inspiration for one of my main characters, a clone of the ancient god Thoth. In the preface to her book, she describes how a seemingly impossible creation like Frankenstein allows the author’s imagination to better describe humans. “The event on which the interest of the story depends is exempt from the disadvantages of a mere tale of spectres or enchantment. It was recommended by the novelty of the situations which it developes; and, however impossible as a physical fact, affords a point of view to the imagination for the delineating of human passions more comprehensive and commanding than any which the ordinary relations of existing events can yield.' I knew I would need antagonists and so I drew on mythical figures that included Djinn. These are spirits from the Muslim tradition capable of changing shapes and influencing people. I believe that the Universe is in balance between positive and negative and everything in it needs to find that balance. It was fun to use traditional forms of what religious mythology might call devils to do that. I am somewhat Buddhist in my beliefs and think souls (consciousness) are recycled. Some of my research has revealed children and adults are often born with memories of their past lives. A seminal book for me was Many Lives, Many Masters by Brian Weiss. I also learned occupants of UFO’s have been recorded by abductees as saying that reincarnation, or the recycling of souls, is the primary mechanism through which our Universe works. I framed my antagonists both human and other, as very smart, cynical, relentless, presences. My Djinn called Marida, a main character in My Quantum Life, provided a good balance to my teacher Raphael a consciousness coming from outside of our universe. In the first three books of the series the antagonists are human and in the last book The Creators, they are very powerful Djinn, and their actions don’t only affect humans but also the “others,” in this Universe who we are beginning to understand also share it with us. Most gratifying to me however as I wrote the series was to imagine how humans might survive the brutal effects of climate change. How we might use everything we had learned from past mistakes to create a different kind of civilization that would not be perfect but more collective in nature. In this story I included my father’s thoughts on a better situation in Israel/Palestine, and imagined the settlement of Galgala where Jews and Arabs lived together peacefully, bound by their shared heritage and their intellectual curiosity. We would do this with a dab of help from kindly, civilizations within our Universe that were more advanced on the Kardashev scale than us. However, they would be nothing like us. They would operate using a completely different “unwelt”, and have a different biology and set of morals, and ethics. They would be master genetic engineers who had had a hand in producing us in the first place, but who were now after something much bigger than our current model, with all its inherent flaws. I finished the first book in the series, The Burning Years in 2017. Both Tor and Del Rey were seriously considering it for publication, when I got an offer from Deron Douglas who was the publisher of Double Dragon, and I accepted it. Double Dragon was sold in 2022 and I obtained the rights to my book. After writing for eleven years I finally finished the series in December 2023. I had written book one and five between 2013 and 2017. I received an offer to publish all five books from
in Janaury 2024, which I accepted. The first book in the series will be re-published July 25, 2024 – my father’s birthday.