the surface of our warm lonely planet

Rugby Cement Works, on the way out of town.

I realised that I’ve become a climate writer by mistake.

My short story, “The Last Good Time to be Alive,” appeared in Reckoning 4 this week (check her out, I hear she’s pretty good). I’ve described it as a short story about internet girlfriends in a flood in the future, though it actually emerged from an idea I had for a larger project: it was still set in the near future, but the flood was incidental, and the heart of the concept was Marlo’s ‘cancellation’ by her audience online. I’m sort of relieved I didn’t end up writing that iteration, not least because I worry that it would have been contentious in a way that diverted attention from what I wanted to say.

I got distracted from the cancellation idea, because I thought too hard about what the future might look like. For a writer looking at near futures, trying to keep it terrestrial, there is no way to think about the future without taking into account the present — and at present, we are in a state of emergency. Extrapolate from there and the conflict the narrative requires is already baked in. The weather’s broken. The sea is creeping further and further inland. God only knows what the political landscape will look like, as the climate crisis displaces more and more of the global south, and the higher ground becomes a precious, lifesaving commodity.

“The Last Good Time to be Alive” does not try to encompass the world at large, because I’m a comparatively sheltered white person, and I know better than to overreach. It’s set in my hometown, Rugby; you wouldn’t know it, but it’s secretly set in my parents’ house, on a sharp street corner at the foot of a small hill. There really was a brook at the back of our house, running parallel to the garden, and it really would threaten to burst its banks after rain.

Rugby is a singularly unremarkable place. It’s a boarding school with a tired industrial town grafted on; it’s a rail freight terminal with a dead and joyless heart. I left as soon as I could. I think of it all the time, because the world is changing and Rugby is changing with it. I’ve seen it cited as a place for working Londoners to retreat to, with its direct line to Euston and its desperately low cost of housing. I drove back with my dad for a school friend’s wedding, and he pointed out all the new warehouses hunched at the edge of town.

Zuri, the protagonist of the short story, lives an isolated, increasingly dangerous life in Rugby. She’s offered the chance to leave. Despite everything, it’s harder than anyone expects for her to take it.

Home is difficult and complicated, but it never leaves you behind. You mourn, and you move forward. I wanted to write a story about that — about home, but about that duality, as well. About the living and the grieving and the growing that our world demands of us all.

Arkady Martine, who guest-edited Reckoning 4, has written with characteristic power about withstanding the temptation of apocalyptic despair:

“I reject it because the apocalyptic is itself a form of denial. It is a place to hide within. It is also a kind of violence, inflicted on us—sometimes unintentionally, sometimes quite deliberately by agents—whether they are fossil fuel companies or simply people who cannot imagine a future different from the one which gives them some power and some control—to push us away from the work.”

I don’t always know how to reject it. Mired in my early teens, I was horrified at what I read in the news about global warming, the greenhouse effect, holes in the ozone layer. My dad would drive us up the motorway to visit family further north, and I would look at the sky, anxious that our car would be the one to exhale that fatal, tipping-point breath of carbon fumes. I couldn’t cope. The terrible scale of the world and the damage done overpowered me in every quiet moment. I had to shove it to the back of my mind just to get through the day without panicking.

I’m older now, and the world is more complicated than one car journey or one apocalyptic instant. I have to balance the pull toward hopelessness with the need to keep being, and with the need to cling to what joy there is to be found.

A friend of mine, like Marlo, makes videos on the internet. I borrowed the title of my story from him, though I haven’t told him yet (if you’re reading this: surprise, bitch). We weren’t talking about the climate, exactly; we were talking about how strange it was to be able to listen to the same song together, at the same time, continents apart. “This is absolutely the best time to be alive,” he said, “and probably the last good time to be alive.” I don’t know to what extent I agree, but at the time it resonated hard. We live in the future, and it is climate catastrophe burning down California and driving indigenous communities off the melting ice of their homes, but it is also listening to an album you love with strangers on the internet. It’s forging a connection you didn’t expect to forge, in a place where you didn’t expect to be. It’s internet girlfriends in a flood in the future, holding space for one another in the midst of a devouring storm.

I became a climate writer by mistake, but not by accident. We know what’s happening. We’ve known for a while. I am trying to live with that knowledge, and to respond to it the only way I know how; I am gathering the things I will take with me into the future, fear enough to keep me moving forward, joy enough to see me through the dark. If this is the last good time to be alive, then I want to approach it with purpose. I hope you enjoy the story, and I hope you at least feel prepared as we face down 2020.