Welcome to the Age of Neverstorms

plus some fairly big Book News

Book News

Before we get into this edition, I wanted to share some news. My next novel has been picked up by Soho Press, which I am so very stoked about. Tentatively titled Absence, it’s a cosmic mystery about trying to make the world make sense in the face of unprecedented times. It’s a fast-paced supernatural thriller, and I can’t wait for you all to get to read it. Here’s the obligatory Publishers Marketplace announcement:

Climate Survival Means Preparing Everywhere

An increasingly common experience in our contemporary world, in which our bonds of kinship and friendship are often networked and spread out, is hearing and reading about areas impacted by climate chaos and feeling an itch of familiarity, a sense that, don’t you know someone who lives around there? Turns out I do have friends and family in the Asheville/Hendersonville area of North Carolina, which were` badly hit by Hurricane Helene. Everyone is okay, thankfully, but last weekend was an anxious few days of spotty contact, punctuated by pictures of tree-struck houses trickling through my family’s text network.

In my book Our Shared Storm: A Novel of Five Climate Futures, I tried to coin a term: neverstorm. A neverstorm is an unprecedented — and yet, thanks to climate change, increasingly common and likely — heavy weather event that hits a locale not used to that particular valence of climate mayhem. It’s a disaster beyond a hundred-year-storm or hundred-year-flood. A disaster that has never happened before in recorded memory. These events are so destructive not just because of their severity (though they are severe), but because they catch communities and institutions and infrastructure flat footed.

My book imagines a particular, fictional example of a neverstorm: a hurricane charging up the Rio de la Plata to hit Buenos Aires in the middle of hosting COP40 — with varying results, depending on which scenario one is in. But the years since I first wrote the word in 2019 have given us plenty of real life examples. The megafires that caused Orange Sky Day in California in 2020, and that choked the air over half the continent in 2023, for instance. Or the polar vortex freeze that knocked out the Texas power grid in 2021. Or the heat waves that disrupt life in northern cities like Portland or Vancouver. Or, most recently, Hurricane Helene, a storm hundreds of miles across, which came up the western side of Florida and carved a swath through the south that was visible from space. Helene brought massive flooding to North Carolina communities that had never considered themselves hurricane risk zones, because they are hundreds of miles from the coast.

Helene’s path, as seen in power outages

In the novel, neverstorms feature most prominently in the second section, a capitalist-surrealist future in which redevelopment after heavy weather is big business and emissions mitigation has gone out the window. The story features a pair of hustlers who try to win some funding by claiming their software platform predicts neverstorms — right before a real neverstorm hits. They’re offering (falsely) the last piece of the puzzle for a world that’s decided everything can be financialized away if you have the right risk analysis and don’t care much about the human costs.

This past week

Hamilton Nolan

wrote an interesting post titled ‘Bad Climate Socialism’ about how, on the spectrum between state-planned managed retreat from hurricane-prone areas and letting the free market accurately price insurance for those areas to force people to leave, we are choosing a dangerous middle ground.

Due to the nature of our political system, which rewards cowardice and punishes anyone who might dare to tell coastal homeowners that they are fucked, we are going to get a blend of the worst aspects of both options. Politicians will demand federal bailouts of the costs associated with each disaster, and they will introduce various regulations and financial schemes to artificially hold down the price of insurance—well below its true price, meaning a price that would allow insurance companies to fully pay for all of the costs that climate change will impose. These costs will continually increase. Eventually, the costs to the nation of subsidizing the ability of people to live in unwise locations will be so enormous that all the rest of the citizens will revolt. “Save our homes!” one side will cry. “Why should I pay for you to live at the beach?” everyone else will cry. A vicious political war will ensue.

I don’t entirely disagree with this analysis, but I do want to take issue with some of the framing. Because if we were to enact a “managed retreat” from the high risk coasts, communities like Hendersonville and Asheville, two hundred miles from the beach, are exactly the areas that we would have people retreat to. In fact, Asheville was once touted as a “climate haven” that people moved to specifically to avoid climate risk. Now, thanks to Helene’s neverstorm-style flooding and wind, these towns are decimated and hundreds are dead. As many op-eds this past week have pointed out, nowhere is safe.

Yes, some coastal areas are certainly more at risk, and it’s counterproductive to rebuild there over and over again. Maybe we can phase those areas into a huge national park, so that people can enjoy the beach when the weather is light and no homes and livelihoods are lost when the weather is heavy. That’s a kind of managed retreat I can see working. It gets trickier when we consider how vital our ports are to getting anything done in this globalized world — as the brief dockworker strike this past week hammered home.

But let’s not kid ourselves that the country can be neatly divided into “states who need bailouts” and “states who don’t,” as Hamilton suggests. The nature of climate chaos is that hurricanes and other superstorms will be more frequent, more powerful, and more unpredictable. Every so-called low-risk ‘climate haven’ is just one bad roll of the atmospheric dice from being under water, or on fire, or covered in ice.

I think this report from the Climate & Community Institute strikes a good balance. It suggests creating state agencies that would provide public disaster insurance alongside risk reduction efforts, that would bring democratic control to this arena, instead of letting the market privatize the profits while we socialize the losses.

I just don’t see a future in which everyone moves into impervious climate fortresses. Until we repair the damage we’ve done to the climate, we’re going to have to accept that we live in the age of neverstorms. And we’re going to have to start thinking differently about what it means to “foot the bill” when homes and businesses and whole towns are washed away.

Let’s add ‘neverstorm’ to our climate lexicon. It reminds us that all communities need to be prepared for heavy weather; that we have to invest in robust infrastructure and diverse disaster response capacity everywhere; that no matter how far we retreat, there will still be a need for bailouts; and that we should cultivate compassion and solidarity, instead of miserliness and resentment, because what happens to places deemed “unwise” can happen to us, too.

News, Reviews + Miscellany

• Charles Payseur had nice things to say in Locus about my story "The Concept Shoppe: A Rocky Cornelius Consultancy,” which came out earlier this year in Escape Pod:

  Hudson blends an undeniable energy and culture-focused voice that makes even the grittier elements seem fun rather than harrowing. And it further expands the world of Rocky Cornelius and her unique way of moving through the world, trailing de­struction and surprisingly satisfied customers.

• PGR at Woldbuilding.Agency riffed on my “America After the Gas Station” post from last month:

  So perhaps now I have a good answer for the people who (not unreasonably) ask me how I'll recognise mature solarpunk fiction when I see it: mature solarpunk fiction will have internalised the charging station as an image and as a location in the same way that C20th cinema internalised the gas station.

• This past month I had the pleasure of giving a talk for the ASU Worldbuilding Initiative. This is a great event series, supported by the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics and helmed by my friend and teacher

  Matt Bell
  . I presented alongside my fellow Sci-Fi Economics Lab resident Joffa Applegate, an ASU complexity economist. The topic was “Sci-Fi Economics: Using Speculative Fiction to Imagine Alternative Futures.” Joffa talked about how designing our economies is a kind of imaginative worldbuilding, and I went the other direction and talked about why worldbuilders (the creative kind) should think about economics, and some strategies for doing so. It was a great conversation. You can watch the video of it here.

Recommendations + Fellow Travellers

• I can’t recommend enough these stories by Lee Derouen about futuristic third spaces, published by my friends at the ASU Center for Science and the Imagination. They’re my favorite kind of science fiction — in which the imaginative new technologies on display enable larger conversations about where we are going as a culture and a planet.

• If you haven’t been following my partner CY Ballard’s Cosmic Mystery Club newsletter, this past month’s edition featured the fantastic video game Pentiment and breaks down the “Palimpsest vs. Lacuna” framework we’ve been batting about together for some time. Check it out!

• My good friends Robert Kirsch and Emily Ray have a book coming out later this year from Columbia University Press that I’m very excited for: Be Prepared: Doomsday Prepping in America. If, like me, you’ve been waiting for someone to connect the dots between the Boy Scouts and Silicon Valley Mars fantasies, give this one a preorder.

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If you like this newsletter, consider subscribing or checking out my climate fiction novel Our Shared Storm, which Publisher’s Weekly called “deeply affecting” and “a thoughtful, rigorous exploration of climate action.”