Presence of the Past in Climate Fiction
A conversation between Tracy Richardson and P. Finian Reilly
Both Tracy Richardson’s and P. Finian Reilly’s novels bring the past to bear on contemporary environmental issues. Richardson published her novel Catalyst in 2020. It follows 16-year-old Marcie Horton as she spends the summer helping excavate an ancient Mississippian settlement – and learns a stunning truth about its original inhabitants while also fighting to protect the area from fracking.
Reilly’s novel Ice’s End is about Roscoe Slake, works for a corporation that sells Antarctic meltwater to the parched Earth of 2123. In its archives, he finds a secret from the Ross Antarctic Expedition of 1839-43 that could make fresh water plentiful again.
Richardson and Reilly, whose first name is Patrick, discussed how they wove history together with contemporary environmental challenges.
Patrick Reilly: What inspired you to write Catalyst?
Tracy Richardson: I have a degree in Biology and science and environmental themes feature prominently in my books, with each book having a different topic. In Catalyst I decided to focus on fracking. There are so many renewable energy alternatives to fossil fuels it is incredible to me that we would pump unregulated carcinogenic chemicals into the ground to extract natural gas and then call it “Clean Natural Gas”. There isn’t a great deal of fracking in southern Indiana, so I took some creative license, but all across southern Indiana and Illinois are small oil pumps dotting the rural landscape. I hope to bring attention to different environmental issues with my books. What about you?
Patrick Reilly: I was mainly inspired by my time as a local newspaper reporter in western Montana. In that job, I covered a lot of environmental problems involving water access and water quality. I saw how these basic human needs were affected by 19th Century territorial claims and legal doctrines, and modern trends like climate change and reactionary right-wing politics. I wanted to write a novel that pushed what I saw to the extreme.
It’s interesting that both novels deal with water issues. Why was that a topic you chose?
Tracy Richardson: There’s the saying ‘Water is Life’. Our bodies are 90% water. Without access to clean, fresh water our civilization cannot survive. Years ago no one bought bottled water. You got it for free from your tap. Now plastic bottles of water are everywhere. Not only do you have to pay for them, but the plastic bottles become trash (don’t get me started on that!) And companies are pumping water from our aquifers to bottle and sell, sometimes paying very little for the access. Fracking contaminates the groundwater with unregulated chemicals and by releasing methane gas. They use open tanks to hold the used fracking water to off-gas the chemicals into the atmosphere. Homeowners and farmers whose wells are contaminated can no longer drink the water that comes out of their faucet or use it for livestock. The methane gas in the water actually makes it flammable! I really wanted to highlight how terrible fracking is for our environment and water resources.
Reilly: I agree - water’s a basic necessity for life and one of the basic needs of human civilization. Accessing it is going to be an increased challenge with climate change. Plenty of books and movies in sci-fi and other genres have dealt with water scarcity or water pollution, but there’s a lot more room to explore how these challenges could shape our future. Having seen some of those possibilities for myself during my time out west, I decided to start writing Ice’s End.
Your protagonists contend with both contemporary environmental issues and historical cultures and events. What prompted you to incorporate the past into your environmental fiction?
Richardson: There is a lot of evidence that ancient and indigenous cultures had wisdom and knowledge of the natural world and celestial movements that modern scientists are just now discovering. Everyone has heard of Stonehenge, but we know nothing of the civilization that created it, how they created it or how they had the knowledge to align it with celestial movements.
In Catalyst the teens visit Greystone Mountain where there are VW Beetle-sized rectangular stones, similar in size to Stonehenge, scattered across the hilltop. Greystone Mountain is based on an actual place in Southern Indiana called Browning Mountain. No one knows how the stones got there or whether they were once standing up like Stonehenge. The type of stone is not found in the area. It’s very mysterious.
I’m fascinated by the idea that we’ve lost the knowledge of the ancients and wanted to incorporate that in the novel. Ancient and indigenous cultures also lived more closely with the land and its natural cycles, living in harmony with nature rather than exploiting it. I wanted to explore that as well.
Reilly: Some of my favorite books growing up were the Pendragon series by D.J. MacHale and Holes by Louis Sachar, each of which have multiple interwoven storylines in different historical eras. History was also my favorite subject in school and my major in college, so I couldn’t resist working a historical storyline into Ice’s End.
One of the things that fascinates me most about history is how minor events and trends grow more consequential with time. The borders that a few British and French diplomats drew in the Middle East after World War I became hugely consequential once the region started supplying the world’s oil.
I wanted to imagine how Antarctica’s history could reverberate in a future where climate change has made it indispensable.
What kind of research did you do for your novel?
Richardson: The setting of the novel is an archaeological dig site of Native Americans known as Mississipians who lived in the area from approximately AD 1000 to AD 1450. I based this on visits I made to Angel Mounds historic site in southern Indiana, Cahokia Mounds in Illinois near St Louis and an Indiana University active dig site in southern Illinois called Emerald Mound. I tried to be sensitive to the portrayal of the Native American historical site in the novel.
It also tied into the metaphysical aspect of the novel where Marcie feels connected to the people who lived and worked at the site hundreds of years ago. My science geekiness really comes into play with the metaphysical/sci-fi aspect. The novel explores the possibility of other dimensions as well as the Universal Energy Field, something that was proposed by Nikola Tesla in the early 20th century. I read a lot of books on the topic by physicists who are studying these concepts. It’s fascinating! There is more to the world than we know and science is proving that every day.
Reilly: Once I figured out that I wanted to write a story where Antarctica supplied the world’s water, I looked for its exact setting – the place where that kind of operation would likely be based. Once I found that spot on the Antarctic coast, I read about the first expeditions who visited it to find the kinds of details, moments, and characters I could hang a story on.
Visiting Antarctica sadly wasn’t an option, but I was able to get plenty of colorful details about life down there from adventure-travel videos and podcasts. My publisher and I also got valuable feedback from a beta reader who had spent time in that part of Antarctica.
Richardson: What should fans of your books read if they want to learn more about its subject matter?
Reilly: Erebus by Michael Palin was my jumping-off point for research and gives a great account of the expedition that I fictionalized in Ice’s End. Sea of Glory by Nathaniel Philbrick and Madhouse at the End of the Earth by Julian Sancton are also great accounts of 19th Century Antarctic voyages.
For a more contemporary look at what Antarctica is like, I’d recommend The White Darkness by David Grann, Antarctica: An Intimate Portrait of the World’s Most Mysterious Continent by Gabrielle Walker, and the episode of Parts Unknown where Anthony Bourdain visited Antarctica.
Richardson: Some titles I used in my research were The Day After Roswell by Col. Philip J. Corso; Disclosure by Steven M. Greer, MD, the documentary CE5 Close Encounters of the 5th Kind, The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot, and The Field by Lynne McTaggart.
Reilly: What sets Catalyst apart from other science fiction novels?
Richardson: Catalyst is not about space exploration or space wars. It’s about how we’re not alone in the Universe and how we’re probably not even the most advanced species in the galaxy. It’s based in present time Earth, not a dystopian future, and deals with the real environmental issues we’re facing while exploring the possibility that we are more powerful than we know. That there is more than our Newtonian experience of the world. There is a Quantum experience beyond our five senses.
One of the Ice’s End storylines is set aboard a real Antarctic voyage, the Ross expedition. How much of that storyline is real and how much is made up?
Reilly: The past timeline in Ice’s End is set aboard the Ross Expedition, which explored the Antarctic coast from 1839 to 1843. Each of the named characters aboard that voyage, and all but one of the named characters they meet in port, are real. The dates and locations of each port-of-call given in the story are accurate. There are also some letters and remarks that I quoted verbatim and cited in an Author’s Note.
Almost all of the dialogue between characters, and their personalities, are fictional. The main character in that storyline, a low-ranking officer named Henry Braddick Yule, really did have a father who served at the Battle of Trafalgar. I spun that fact into a fanciful backstory that motivates Yule for most of the book. There are some real events on the voyage that I played for suspense. I also made out the expedition’s leader, Captain James Clark Ross, to be much more of a tyrant than he probably was in real life.
Tracy, what can we as individuals do to help the environment and address Climate Change?
Richardson: The most important thing we can do is speak up. Speak truth to power. Show up at marches. Support candidates who support the environment. Demand change.
The NRDC says that the biggest cause of climate change is carbon emissions. The biggest carbon emitters are corporations and gas-powered vehicles. I think as individuals, though, the biggest impact we can have is to reduce our use of single-use plastic. Plastic shopping bags, plastic straws and cups and bottles, plastic food storage bags and takeout containers, product wrappers, etc. all end up in landfills and the oceans. They don’t degrade for thousands of years, if ever. Microplastics are in our food and drinking water and end up in our bodies. There are enormous islands of plastic trash floating in the oceans. Reducing our plastic use is critical. Simply using reusable shopping bags and skipping plastic straws are small things that can have a big impact.
Patrick, you also work as an environmental attorney. What connections or parallels do you see between that job and your fiction writing?
Reilly: It’s nice to have a day job that’ll keep me from starving if my books don’t sell. But in all seriousness, I think both environmental law and my environmental fiction deal with the legacies of pasts where our attitudes towards the Earth were different. The Ross expedition carried out incredibly valuable scientific research, but all for the goals of conquest, exploitation, and subjugation.
In my book, their pursuit of those goals shape Antarctica’s future. A lot of environmental law, meanwhile, tries to rectify harm that was either acceptable or unknowable when it was inflicted. Allocating cleanup liability for decades-old contamination is a whole field of law in itself. Now there’s a growing effort to hold countries and companies liable for their historic contributions to climate change.
What’s next for you? I ended Ice’s End on a shameless cliffhanger; rest assured I’m already at work on the sequel.
Richardson: I am doing final edits on the third book in The Catalysts series titled, Precipice, which has two concurrent storylines. It also ends on a cliffhanger, so there will be a fourth book. I have a middle grade novel, The Secret of Jamison Woods, that is in final edits as well and an idea for another middle grade book. All of the books feature the same family, but different children are the protagonists. Of course they all have environmental themes.
Find out more about Ice’s End and Catalyst.
Tracy Richardson is the author of the young adult series The Catalysts, including Book I, The Field, and Book II, Catalyst. The Field won the Eric Hoffer Award and a Bronze Medal for the Moonbeam Children’s Book Award and was a Finalist in the Science Fiction category for the American Fiction Awards. Catalyst won the New Age category and was a Finalist in the Young Adult category for the American Fiction Awards.
Tracy has a degree in biology, and her science background plays a significant role in her writing; her books include science themes such as quantum physics, collective consciousness, and the universal energy field, as well as strong environmental themes. There is no second planet. Tracy lives in Indianapolis and enjoys crafting, cooking, and being outdoors. For more information about Tracy Richardson’s fiction, visit www.tracyrichardsonauthor.com or follow her on Instagram and Threads at @tracyrichardsonauthor.
P. Finian Reilly studied history at the University of Chicago, then got a different kind of education working as a local newspaper reporter in Montana. In that job learned to drive a motorboat alongside a burning lakeshore, interview antigovernment militia leaders, and appreciate just how thorny humanity’s relationship with the natural world can get. After earning top state and regional environmental-reporting awards, he earned his J.D. at Georgetown and now lives and works as an environmental attorney in New Jersey. His debut novel ICE’S END is scheduled for publication by 12 Willows Press in June 2025.
P. Finian Reilly can be found online at www.pfinianreilly.com, or on Bluesky and Instagram at Finnian Lyon
New additions to Climate League website
Alongside our database of Agents looking for Climate Fiction, Learning Resources and Authors by Country, we’ve now added a page on Uplifting Positive Climate Fiction, as well as a database of Books by Region (set in Asia, Europe, Antarctica, Space, etc). Check it out!
Solutions Spotlight
In The Water That May Come, Amy Lilwall considers rising sea levels. She says “I'm not convinced that moving from Margate to Nuneaton is a solution to climate change, but it is certainly a solution for my character, Gavin.”
Carla looks at him through half closed eyes. ‘We can’t stay, you wally.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because England is about to get drowned.’
‘You’re sure about that, are you?’
‘Don’t be daft, Ryan.’
Their mum says, ‘We’re only ten minutes from the coast.’
‘Exactly,’ says Ryan. ‘None of us can leave England. So we’ll have to move inland.’
Carla puts her hands on the table, pushes herself up to leave.
‘Can we just listen to Ryan?’ says Gavin.
They all look at Gavin. Carla sits down in her chair.
‘If you ask Google,’ says Ryan, picking up his phone, ‘what’s the town in the UK furthest from the coast, you get Nuneaton.