Why The Steep Climes Quartet?

Having the climate crisis feel real in one’s day-to-day life is, author David Guenette argues, an important prerequisite for an individual to take effective action. Even though everyone is steeped in the climate crisis, most of us can still too easily ignore it.

While there are days—even now, weeks-long periods—when climate change news is the stuff of front page headlines, it remains all too easy to ignore climate events that may not seem to affect us directly. But guess what? Climate change is already an everyday presence in our lives, whether in the form of political battles, or growing costs for some foods because of droughts, or the lack—or vicious increase in price— of insurance for more and more of us. As a society, we haven’t even figured out how climate change is affecting us in our routine lives. We are like the proverbial deer caught in the headlights of the onrushing climate crisis, not even thinking about leapng away.

Guenette knows that democracy works best only when a sufficient number of individuals take action. Considering the powerfully entrenched economic interests at play (the fossil fuel industry and nations that deal in trillions of carbon dollars each year), it should surprise no one that there is ongoing inertia around climate crisis amelioration. He sees that successful climate crisis resolutions are going to have to push past of lot of well-established and well-funded industries, making requsite the building of a countering momentum in the form of huge numbers of individuals.

Is there a basis for optimism? Well, keep in mind, Guenette suggests, that the current Republican House recently tried to tie the latest debt ceiling vote to agreements that would have severely undermined the Inflation Reduction Act’s climate change amelioration plans, which should make any reasonable person worry about our current politics stalling climate progress. There is every reason to think that political struggles will continue to effect climate crisis remediation efforts, and that these fights will be an important part of the story writ large on the national and international scenes and writ small in state and local governance. How climate crisis remediation is perceived by citizens—burden, expense, obligation, necessity—is another important aspect of the story to be told.

Of course, writing a series on climate crisis in its quotidian camouflage can be problematic for a novel’s need to be entertaining, and that’s why Kill Well and the other books of The Steep Climes Quartet carry the plot structure of thrillers. And when you think about it, the climate crisis is about as thrilling you can get for real life (i.e., existential) drama.

Or as the old Chinese curse goes, May you live in interesting times.