BONUS: Climate Book Reviews with author Ashley Shelby on Honeymoons in Temporary Locations

In this latest episode of Ed’s occasional podcast Climate Book Reviews, we dive into the wildly imaginative and disturbingly plausible world of Ashley Shelby’s acclaimed story collection, Honeymoons in Temporary Locations.

Recently named one of Fresh Energy’s Favorite Climate Books of 2025 and shortlisted for the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, Shelby’s collection has been praised by Scientific American, Foreword, and the Post and Courier for its biting wit, emotional punch, and genre-bending storytelling.

Ed is joined by his regular co-host Dr. Roger Thompson—now Director of Writing Programs and Professor at Arizona State University—for a lively, funny, and far-ranging conversation with Shelby herself. They unpack her satirical takes on resistance, inequality and privilege in crisis (think "luxury apocolypse bunkers”), and what it means to grieve - and medicate away - the losses brought on by climate change.

Shelby’s work has appeared in Slate, The New York Times Book Review, LitHub, Salon, and Audubon, and she’s received the Red Hen Press Short Fiction Award, the Enizagam Short Story Award, and the Third Coast Fiction Prize. She’s also the author of Red River Rising, an acclaimed account of the 1997 Grand Forks flood.

If you like your climate fiction smart, satirical, and maybe a little too close to home, this one’s for you.

More info and past Climate Book Reviews episodes at: climatebookreviews.co

Produced by Amit Tandon & Bespoke Podcasts

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Ed Whittingham: Hey everyone, it's Ed. I'm sharing another episode of my occasional podcast called Climate Book Reviews. I co-host it with my old friend, Dr. Roger Thompson, who has just left Stony Brook University in New York for warmer climbs, as a new director of writing programs and professor at Arizona State University.

[00:00:21] Ed Whittingham: Our goal with a pod is to curate some climate energy related books worth knowing about. In this episode, we dive into the wildly imaginative. And disturbingly plausible world of Ashley Shelby's acclaimed story collection, Honeymoons in Temporary Locations recently named one of Fresh Energy's favorite climate books of 2025 and shortlisted for the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize.

[00:00:44] Ed Whittingham: Shelby's collection has been praised by Scientific American, Forward, and the Post and Courier for its biting wit emotional punch and genre of. Bending storytelling. We had a lively, funny, and far ranging conversation with Ashley herself while unpacking her satirical takes on resistance, inequality, and privilege and crisis, and what it means to grieve and medicate away losses brought on by climate change.

[00:01:08] Ed Whittingham: If you like your climate fiction, smart, satirical, and maybe a little too close to home, this one's for you. For more info, check out climate book reviews.com. Now over to Roger and happy listening, 

[00:01:21] Roger Thompson: Ashley, really appreciate you joining us. 

[00:01:23] Ashley Shelby: Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to have this conversation with you.

[00:01:27] Roger Thompson: I, I don't even know exactly where to begin on this because the, the book is so diverse. It has so many kind of modes of expression. I guess that's the way I would say it, uh, form genres. Um, it clips along at a remarkable pace. You start a collection with, I gather, a, a. Hugo nominated Novella Novelette, um, based off of, uh, Benito Serino, which I should, I should disclose.

[00:01:49] Roger Thompson: I'm a bit of a scholar in Benito Serino, so as I, and I didn't know that was what that was doing, and I was reading, I was like, she must know Benito Serino and then suddenly going along and like, oh yeah, she absolutely does. And it's, it's really a great creative challenging in the sense of it confronts you.

[00:02:04] Roger Thompson: Right. Not in terms of the read. Great read, but it just challenged you, at least challenged me emotionally. So I guess what I wanna start with here is just a little bit of talking about how you've come to the intersection of your climate awareness, your climate, and your interest in climate, uh, change and the craft of short fiction.

[00:02:24] Roger Thompson: I mean, this is a tough thing to wed, so I'm curious about how you got there. 

[00:02:28] Ashley Shelby: Well, gosh, um, it took the long road. I actually started as an environmental journalist and uh, my first book 21 years ago was Red River Rising. Um, the Anatomy of a Flood in the Survival of an American City was the subtitle and it was about Grand Forks, North Dakota, and what was at the time?

[00:02:45] Ashley Shelby: The most expensive natural disaster in American history, which was the flooding of the Red River, which it is just very interesting because, um, the entire community blamed that flood on the National Weather Service, um, for not predicting the flood crest correctly. They were unfairly judged for that. I was able to get interviews with hydrologists, um, and there was a quirk and a rating curve.

[00:03:06] Ashley Shelby: It's a long story. I learned a lot. Reporting that book, because I was very young. I was 22, 23, I knew nothing about life. And here I was interviewing people who had lost everything. They'd lost their homes, they'd lost, you know, their photo books, you know, before, you know the ubiquity of of iPhones. But also they were told that they needed to clear the floodplain and the rebuilding effort.

[00:03:26] Ashley Shelby: So they, they had a neighborhood that was built up right along the dike and, um, in what was astonishingly good decision, um, they decided to clear that floodplain. But the, the human process of that was heartbreaking. So. I, I learned a great deal about the how complicated the intersection between nature and extreme nature events and, and civilization and humanity can be, and, and that is not very straightforward.

[00:03:52] Ashley Shelby: The problem with the journalism though, is that I'm an introvert and so. That took so much out of me, you know, interviewing people, even people when they didn't wanna be interviewed. I, I did one more work of journalism, which was a report for the nation on ExxonMobil's attempt to get out of pain, the punitive damage, a portion of their settlement with the, the fishers of Prince William Sound.

[00:04:11] Ashley Shelby: Um, you may be familiar with it. It just dragged on for 25 years. People's lives were absolutely ruined, but they also ruined the lives of scientists. I interviewed a federal scientist, uh, who had just. Had his reputation completely tarnished by, uh, ExxonMobil's PR folks. And, uh, just for saying there was still oil in the sound.

[00:04:31] Ashley Shelby: And I remember I got on a float plane with him and we went out to, uh, just sort of like a random spit of land in the sound. It was not inhabited, it was very small. And we hop out and he's kneeling on the sand with a child's, you know, sand shovel, essentially a spade. And he digs a spade full of sand out.

[00:04:52] Ashley Shelby: He's come over and look and I look and he digs out one more spade full of sand and crude oil bubbled up. And this was in 2004, so obviously there was still oil in the sound, but also just thinking about how long things like that stay in the ecosystem. Again, another learning experience for me. So I'm very grateful that I had the opportunity to do journalistic work because it taught me the importance of listening, obviously listening to people, hearing multiple perspectives, but also, um, the importance of fact.

[00:05:20] Ashley Shelby: And that's always been very important to me. My dad's a journalist, and one of the things that's been important to me in my fiction is that everything I write be, even if it's speculative, be plausible, or if I'm writing realistic fiction like my first book South Pole Station, that. That the science is right.

[00:05:37] Ashley Shelby: I have a lot of scientists in my work, um, that the science is right. So it was, it was a great preparation, but as an introvert, it was just not sustainable. So I, I started writing fiction and I, my first novel was the aforementioned South Pole station set in Antarctica in the early two thousands with a, um, there's multiple plot lines.

[00:05:55] Ashley Shelby: 'cause you know, there's very. Interesting people who go down there, including my sister, who is one of the only women who ever wintered over at South Pole wouldn't tell me much because it's a closed society. You go down there for reasons you don't want broadcast, but she would always kind of fact check and she's like, yeah, that could happen, or, yeah, that did happen.

[00:06:14] Ashley Shelby: I mean, no, I, I'm not saying that did happen, but it definitely would happen in certain circumstances. So, you know, that was really an interesting experience, especially because I have a cli, a climate denier in the book. At the time I was writing this, um, it was during the Obama administration, so I thought I was sort of writing a bit of historical fiction here.

[00:06:34] Ashley Shelby: You know, the climate denialism of the early, you know, two thousands merchants of doubt. We were on the right path. I was hopelessly naive and by the time it was published in 2017, and that's how long it takes books to get published, people were telling me, uh, oh, wow. What a critical commentary on. You know, the climate change situation and the political situation, you're so prescient.

[00:06:55] Ashley Shelby: And I'm sitting here thinking I'm not prescient. I was just a, just a hopeful fool, you know? And it was around that time that I was trying to write my second book and I thought, you know, I'm gonna try and write another realistic, traditional, novel. Climate change is probably going to be in my work for the rest of my career, because that is the world we live in Now, to me, the term climate fiction is pretty misleading because in my world.

[00:07:19] Ashley Shelby: It's realistic fiction. You know, maybe not the Wilder spec, more speculative stuff, but I couldn't write speculative scenarios fast enough during the writing of this particular book, honeymoons and Temporary locations, before it would become something on the news. Part of that is because of my journalistic background, I listen to the scientists.

[00:07:41] Ashley Shelby: I love scientists. I love science. I wish I had been when I was not built that way. You know, I, I would do anything to have been built that way, but I trust and, and, and listen to scientists and everything that the climate scientists were saying. And even if you had to read between the lines, sometimes is starting to unfold.

[00:07:59] Ashley Shelby: And I think sometimes at a pace that. They're surprised by unless, and I always wonder about this unless they're keeping the more dire possibilities from us, because I have been in conversation with certain climate scientists who feel is vitally important to always. Present the possibility that, not that anything can be fixed, but that could be mitigated so that people don't be become paralyzed.

[00:08:24] Ashley Shelby: And of course, and I was listening to the Climate Energy podcast the other day with Katherine Hayhoe, um, who was talking about that very thing that, um, when you tell people there are no solutions, you know, they just, they're just gonna shut down. But they need to be told what they can do, not what is happening.

[00:08:41] Ashley Shelby: I was grappling with that, um, and I was finding it very difficult to write a traditional novel. Um, it just seemed almost like fiddling while Rome burns. I'm like, you know, yeah. I could write another realistic novel of like a marriage falling apart in the context of climate change and, um, a woman finding herself or a man finding himself.

[00:09:00] Ashley Shelby: And, ugh, every time I tried it, it just seemed so unimportant to me. Yet every time I tried to write speculative about climate change. I thought, wait, it doesn't feel speculative. It feels like it's happening right now, or it could happen. During the process of writing this, I wrote an essay for Lit Hub and uh, I, I, I proposed a term first impact fiction, which in hindsight, I just don't want it labeled that way because that's how we segregate these types of books from.

[00:09:27] Ashley Shelby: Literature, it's like, oh, go over to the climate fiction section as if that's separate from our, our daily existence. But what I was realizing was that I was losing a language to talk about what I was feeling. And what I was feeling was grief and hopelessness because it seemed like something could be done, but nothing was being done.

[00:09:48] Ashley Shelby: But the people who could do something. We're going to do it, which is I, which I think is accurate. Um, in some ways, to me, the scientists are the heroes, but at the end of the day, they don't have the deep pockets. They aren't the Elon Musk. I wish there was a climate scientist who was Elon Musk had, like maybe he wins the lottery and you know, some moonshot climate solution comes out of that.

[00:10:10] Ashley Shelby: So. Language started to fail me. All of the tools I'd learned as a writer failed me, you know, narrative structure, dialogue, um, theme coherence even. And I just said to myself, I'm like, you know what? I am, I'm just going to, I'm. I'm just gonna write something. I'm not gonna assume anyone's ever gonna read it, but I'm, I'm gonna be telling myself the story and try to make sense of how I'm feeling.

[00:10:36] Ashley Shelby: And the first piece I wrote, which is actually not in this collection, was a, a fake LinkedIn job listing for Environmental Migrant Management and in the Soil Free Solutions division of a company, which again, by the way, it, in 2016 when I wrote that. Whoa, that that'll never happen. Now I feel like it could be a job listing, but it, it helped me realize something that I didn't have to write in that traditional format.

[00:11:03] Ashley Shelby: To sort of try and make sense of how I was feeling. And that was incredibly helpful for me because, uh, and I'm not sure if you're familiar with the philosopher Timothy Morton, but, um, he talks of hyper objects, which are concepts that are too big for the human mind to fully comprehend. And because we cannot do that, they're.

[00:11:20] Ashley Shelby: Tensely, scary and terrifying. And he categorizes climate change as one of those, because scientists can obviously comprehend, you know, the, the facts and the data and the how's and the why's and the models. But then there's also people like me are, they're trying to figure out what's gonna happen to the world, what's gonna happen to the animals, what's gonna happen?

[00:11:38] Ashley Shelby: What world is my, are my children going to to be part of? And, and that's all part of the same thing. And not one person can, can conceptualize all of it. So I just started, you know, writing and the Miri story, you know, is not something I ever would've written. I would've thought it was dumb, you know, the ask was too big.

[00:11:56] Ashley Shelby: I think the ask is pretty big, you know, if. When you read it, um, you'll know why. But to my surprise, people were very much willing to suspend disbelief and, and get into that story. And I've told my dad, my dad has asked me in the past, he's like, you know, what's your favorite story? And I said, I don't like any of my work.

[00:12:14] Ashley Shelby: I'm like, every writer. Like, everything could have been better. Um, or I didn't quite say it the way I wanted to say it. For me though, it's not that Miri is so well written, it's that Miri says. Probably most clearly how I feel, which is grief, but also a kinship with all the other creatures on this planet.

[00:12:36] Ashley Shelby: And, and it's like my apology to them in some way for participating in a system that is gonna cause suffering. But, you know, again, even that we talk about who, whose fault is it? You know, I, I tell folks all the time, um, they come to my book talks. I'm like, it's not your fault. 

[00:12:51] Ed Whittingham: When you talk about that grief, Ashley, I think of, so nostalgia, climate feel, and then hacking off limbs is a kind of penance for that, all of which I want to get to.

[00:12:59] Ed Whittingham: But um, I do want to just quickly timestamp this podcast because when, you know, you talked about Red River Rising. And flood forecasting for people listening to this later. We're, we're recording this just days after the Kerr County floods, in which now unfortunately, hundreds of people, uh, including many children at a camp called Camp Mystic, lost their lives in a catastrophic, catastrophic flood.

[00:13:25] Ed Whittingham: And flood forecasting has been very topical, become topical and controversial again. But just to pivot a bit back to, uh, honeymoons and temporary locations, which I. Thoroughly enjoyed. I wanna mildly admonish my cohost, Roger, who called it a collection of short fiction, because I don't think that term really does it justice enough.

[00:13:43] Ed Whittingham: Yeah. Yep. Given that you really blend. Traditional short fiction with Murray, but I love your documentary style, kind of recovered texts. Yes, I love that. Menus, brochures, craiglist ads, you know, podcast transcript, which speaks to my heart or our hearts, and then your clinical case studies and kind of marketing materials.

[00:14:04] Ed Whittingham: So I actually haven't come across fiction that I think is that experimentational in, in its form in quite the same way. Before, but I, I do want to ask you, because I, I love your depictions of potential climate futures. You know, it kind of reminds me what Kim Stanley Robinson did in ministry for the Future.

[00:14:25] Ed Whittingham: Your, your scenarios are plausible and I can only imagine that, you know, it went way beyond getting your, obviously, your, your, uh, very qualified sister to do fact checking. So I'd love to know a little bit more how you researched those scenarios and how did you decide how far to push? Each scenario without losing plausibility because again, the thing for me that I really enjoy is or appreciate is, is the plaus, the plausibility.

[00:14:51] Ashley Shelby: Yeah. You know, the publisher initially tried to categorize this as science fiction and I said, uh, you know, um, I love my science fiction friends, but they would be so mad if, if they opened this book as sci-fi and then it wasn't. Um, and, and so you're right, it's not the type of speculative fiction that would necessarily fit into sci-fi, um, because it's too, it's almost too familiar, but it's also.

[00:15:14] Ashley Shelby: Not necessarily set in this moment. It's set in a near moment, relatively near moment. So in terms of how I, um, how I came to write this, yes, I wanted things to be, you know, plausible to, to a climate scientist even. Um, and that just required paying attention, reading sources that were not. Mainstream media sources trying to digest complicated climate material, but specialist magazines or or podcasts or online publications, and.

[00:15:46] Ashley Shelby: Yet some of it was so distressing that I would kind of almost read it, kind of a scan, almost glossing over it because I didn't wanna get to the end and say, okay, if this is not addressed, then X, Y, and Z is gonna happen. 'cause I kind of knew it was gonna be bad and I thought I was doing that, you know, to kind of protect myself emotionally.

[00:16:07] Ashley Shelby: But what it actually allowed me to do was come up with those. Those sort of endpoints myself in terms of fiction, because I think if. I adhere too closely to the science, then, um, it kind of loses that emotional aspect. Um, it, it becomes too detached almost. And so humans kind of make their personal worlds messy.

[00:16:30] Ashley Shelby: And, and so there's a little bit of messiness in the book as well because, um, and humor, I. 

[00:16:36] Ed Whittingham: Kudos. No, there's a ton of humor in there and good humor. 

[00:16:39] Ashley Shelby: Humans, we're gonna be ridiculous in any context, and I kind of, that's one of the things I like about our species, um, is that consistency. But the thing I didn't expect as I was writing this, because what I thought I was writing were, you know, stories about a changed world, um, and how humans are going to kind of exist in that world.

[00:16:58] Ashley Shelby: But by the time I was finished and I'm rereading it, I'm like, wow, this is really. An angry diatribe against capitalism, and I hadn't known that. I had felt quite so strongly about that until I got to the end and I, I was working on the marketing material for climate fuel, which is interesting because I, um, spend a lot of time as a vaccine advocate when I was, when my kids were younger.

[00:17:22] Ashley Shelby: I'm always a big pharma, you know, this big pharma that. Always pushing back against that and, and always talking about, you know, the, the scientists who are creating these life-saving vaccines and just the, it's heroic work. And, you know, many of the vaccine pioneers that, you know, I was lucky enough to talk to ex um, uh, Paul Offit, a lot of them ga gave this away for free, essentially, um, the, the Rotavirus vaccine And what, so then to write this piece that saw a pharmaceutical industry taking advantage of an a speculative environmental illness.

[00:17:53] Ashley Shelby: To literally just make people stop caring so they would continue going to work so they wouldn't care what was happening around them was a surprise to me. And you know, I think that happens to a lot of us writers where it's like what Joan Didion said, we don't know what we think until we write it down as a, as absurd as that sounds.

[00:18:10] Ed Whittingham: Mm-hmm. And it, it does create a bit of a conundrum for, for the reader because one thinks is there, you know, ever an ethical justification for treating climate. Distress pharmacologically versus so nostalgia, which I didn't really know about until I read your book, and then went and tracked down the, the National Institute of Health's definition of it and see that it's, it's been a concept, it's just kind of alluded me for, for the last decade and a half.

[00:18:36] Ed Whittingham: So, nostalgia, if it, it isn't something that should be. Cured because it could be vital to our resistance Exactly. And to actually doing something about climate change instead of just being this emotional immune response to, to what is ecological destruction. 

[00:18:54] Ashley Shelby: Well said. Yes. Um, I, I, I think I say this maybe in, in my ap, not my afterword, but my acknowledgements.

[00:19:00] Ashley Shelby: That, so nostalgia is proof of love. It's proof that we love this planet. We love nature. If we didn't, we wouldn't be distressed by. What, what happens to it? You know, there are people on this planet, I'm one of them, who is just grief stricken when a tree is, is cut down. Um, and you know, in fact, I'm, I'm writing a story right now, an an eco horror fable, um, a.

[00:19:24] Ashley Shelby: That's kind of spawned by the fact that I had a forested lot right next to my house and a guy came by and just, um, you know, 'cause he's building a house there, he just, he just clear cut it with his own, his own machinery and it was extremely difficult to watch. And so I think as long as we are feeling that, we don't have to be afraid of that feeling because it means that we care and we, we love and like you just said, we are more likely to fight for what we love.

[00:19:52] Ashley Shelby: We're going to start seeing however more extreme cases of that. I think I was one of them. I'm, I'm working my way back. But, um, there is a point where it can become completely paralyzing and you can start having those thoughts of like, well, what is the point? Or did I make a mistake bringing my children into this world?

[00:20:10] Ashley Shelby: And so I think there's a balance. And for me, what has been healing has been being outside. Doing things with my hands, like planting a seedling, pulling invasive vines off of my oak tree. Just being, being a fellow creature who happens to have hands who can help in small ways, um, that it's not over that.

[00:20:33] Ashley Shelby: These individual living things, whether they're animals or plants, you know, beautiful trees or you know, mosses that they're around, they're still, they're still working. They're still trying to survive and we can help. And so I think if you're able to help in a small way. It keeps you engaged and it continues to give you hope because what is more hopeful than planting a seed and then walking back outside two days later and seeing a sprout?

[00:20:58] Ashley Shelby: I, I think that's sort of, uh, how I keep myself grounded. 

[00:21:01] Roger Thompson: I mean, I've, I've got, and I know Ed has a story, uh, formed himself, but I have, I lived on a large property, well, 40 some odd acres in Virginia for a while. Ed visited and rode a tractor with me one time, but the, uh, the neighbor there also up above me.

[00:21:17] Roger Thompson: Property on the side of a hill. They clear cut also, um, you know, besides the, the, and it's the most beautiful stand. There's no understory, just stunning. Beautiful to walk up through there. And, you know, I, I'm a private property guy. I acknowledge that, that this, uh, drives to the mic thinking about things at the same time.

[00:21:34] Roger Thompson: It. So disheartening and sad, and it, it changed everything about the forest around it, of course. And in fact, uh, led to serious wind damage in the coming years for our property and another, because suddenly there wasn't that buffer, right? So there's consequences there, but, but for me, it was that it's that yearning for that place.

[00:21:51] Roger Thompson: And that's where I think this, so Stasia has, right? There's this. Yearning feature of it. And I think you're right to assess, you know, this is actually a sign that we as humans have something positive to contribute in the, in these discussions, right? That, that we yearn to have this connection, uh, even as a place around us kind of begins to kind of break apart.

[00:22:13] Ed Whittingham: To, to build upon Roger's story. And, and I still have the, the scars and the distress from it that I've tried to process over multiple long meditation retreats and other forms. But, uh, as a kid, and I didn't know that it was, I called it eco grief when I first became familiar with that term much, much longer ago, that it was eco grief, but a wood lot at the top of the street where I lived.

[00:22:35] Ed Whittingham: Was cut down to make room for a new subdivision. And it wasn't even, you know, first growth. And I didn't know the first, the difference between first growth or second growth, but it was the woods where my little friends and I played and they cut it down and it actually turned us into little monkey wrenchers and then a guy at, at the time, before we knew what monkey wrenching was like, we would go up there, the construction workers would come at night, they'd lay down survey stakes, you know, they'd put down the lumber and literally I was like an I, what was grade.

[00:23:05] Ed Whittingham: Four, grade five. So it would've been as a 10-year-old kid, 11-year-old kid, we'd have night missions. After supper and after the work is left, we'd go up and we'd pull up all the survey staying just as stakes. If there were propane tanks there, we'd open up all the propane tanks. Oh my goodness. You know, we had, if they had left lumber there, we'd like make bonfires of lumber.

[00:23:25] Ed Whittingham: We did everything we could as an act of resistance without really realizing that we were experiencing eco grief. And that was our outlet for combating. It was resistance. And for me that was. Like you can draw a straight line between the work that I do. I don't really do much monkey wrenching anymore. I should have mentioned that when we had the energy versus climate show with Andreas mom, by the way, author of How to Well Up a Pipeline, I should have told you a story, but you can draw a straight line between what I do today and that experience.

[00:23:52] Roger Thompson: I mean, one experience I had while reading your book actually is that a couple, I was about three quarters of the way through it. And I thought to myself, I wonder in these kind of imagined futures that show up in, in this collection, like how far out you're imagining, like what, you know, 'cause 'cause it felt so present to me, right?

[00:24:08] Roger Thompson: It felt so real. And I, and there is, I mean there's great humor, but there is grief in here. There's no question You can feel it. Um, even on some of the shorter things that are kind of. Pithy and hilarious. Um, afterwards, you're, uh, set the book down. You're like, wow, that, that's rough to think about the actual implications of what that might mean for somebody.

[00:24:26] Roger Thompson: And then, then we get to the case studies and we're, we're dating in the 2030. So I guess my question to both of you all, like, I mean, Ashley certainly as the writer of this is speculative imagined future, but I'm curious, ed, your response to that also on the, is this as near a future now? Is this, I mean, I'm, I'm, we're in the context here now where we're not gonna meet.

[00:24:45] Roger Thompson: Any of the target temperatures that was considered best case, uh, and in fact, we'll probably blow past them handily. And so I'm curious about how you. Ashley, I mean, is is that part of the motivation here? You're feeling that it's looming closer than ever? And, and Ed, where do you stand? Are we, are we in 10 years of, of some of these things?

[00:25:04] Ashley Shelby: Yeah. I'd be interested to hear what Ed has to say because I am, uh, to me it feels like it's next door to tomorrow. I think 2030 was just some sort of convenient, you know, hey, it's 10, 15 years. But I would love to hear what Ed thinks about that. 

[00:25:17] Ed Whittingham: Well, uh, sure we're certainly blowing through targets and there's much value around the 1.5 C target, but that was an arbitrary political set target by the IPCC.

[00:25:28] Ed Whittingham: It wasn't really scientific in its basis, but we're clearly plowing through that. And the answer is we, we really don't know. We don't know how much the world is going to warm. Well, but you know, we can say safely. It's gonna be in this band between probably two to three C, and because we've done a lot of good work around trying to decarbonize parts of the global economy and the clean energy economy is worth 2 trillion these days, it looks like we're gonna avoid the most extreme scenarios of warming, which just a few years ago was well above three to five to even more.

[00:26:01] Ed Whittingham: But coming back to you. Ashley, and this is, I'm interested in again, these pla plausible climate futures. You make multiple references to sulfates and to aerosol spraying and the reality of it. And coincidentally, right after this, I'm gonna go over to my energy versus climate co-host house. David Keith to meet with our third co-host, Sarah Hastings.

[00:26:25] Ed Whittingham: Simon, who's been on medical leave and his first time, the three of us will be together in about a year. But of course, he's one of the world's, if not the world's foremost, scientists thinking through what's called solar radiation management or stratospheric, uh, aerosol injection. I, I might contest a bit if, if that were deployed as widely as.

[00:26:45] Ed Whittingham: You say, well, you know, as you depict in multiple points in the book, that could really lower the temperature of the world. And at the risk of parroting David Keefe as I'm want to do with the spend of single digit billions per year, over 10 years, you could lower the temperature of the earth by about a half degree C.

[00:27:01] Ed Whittingham: Coming back to your plausible climate futures, I'd love to know sort of how you dug into that. Topic in particular, solar geoengineering. 

[00:27:10] Ashley Shelby: Sure. Um, so part of this is the function of how collections are written. So the stories that included that were my earlier stories and I had read a book and I'm so sorry I have the worst memory in the world.

[00:27:21] Ashley Shelby: I will get you the name. There was a book by, uh, a man who, and it was about geoengineering, which I thought was cool. But it was speculative. So he would tell me what the technology was and then he would write a little short story about how it could potentially be deployed. Now, he was fervently anti geoengineering at the time.

[00:27:38] Ashley Shelby: I think this book came out, I wanna say in 2015 or 2016, so it's not a new book. And that really captured my attention because he argued that the technologies have, have the. Potential to work, obviously, as you said. But the problem is coordinating with globally. So it's like if you know in Indonesia decides to start utilizing sulfate technology, but this country doesn't, how is it gonna impact things like their agriculture or yields or.

[00:28:06] Ashley Shelby: You know, other things too numerous to mention. And so I didn't come away with a point of view of like, this is good, this is bad. It was more just, oh, this is interesting that this exists. I realize now, uh, as you look online, it is becoming political as it just seems inevitable. Actually, at the time I was writing that, I thought, you know, I feel like in this speculative world, it's plausible that rather than addressing the core causes, which.

[00:28:32] Ashley Shelby: Again, at the time that this man's book came out, that was the preferred approach. It wasn't just, let's just mitigate, mitigate, and like keep going the way we're going. Let's just assume we're gonna keep going the way we're going, and then just try to address it. It was more like, let's try to stop this. So we don't have to mitigate.

[00:28:49] Ashley Shelby: Um, so that, that was sort of the context to which that was written. Um, but I thought, you know, this world that I am imagining, they're not going to, they're going to take the, uh, the easiest path that is least disruptive to capital and capitalism, um, that allows people to continue extracting. At that time, I thought, yeah, well they'll probably just, you know, deploy this stuff and create albedo and you know, do it artificially.

[00:29:15] Ashley Shelby: And my understanding is that there's the potential for rebound effects. I didn't get into anything like that because that was way out of my lane, but I have only been sort of following the progress of this, um, of these technologies. And I'm curious to know, I is this eminent? Do you think that this is something that will be part of our every day?

[00:29:35] Ed Whittingham: I don't think it's imminent, but I think in, in some of the work that I've done here in Canada and talking to the Canadian government about solar geoengineering, which it is. Uh, without outing the government, sort of quietly looking at the, the scenario we put to them is, whether you like it or not, in the next 10 years, Canada and other countries will very likely be pulled into a global conversation about solar geoengineering, whether they, whether they like it or not.

[00:30:02] Ed Whittingham: So they may as well be prepared and at least have a position on it, whether for against or somewhere in between. And that's. Going back to your point around Indonesia or what Kim Stanley Robinson writes about a ministry for the future around India. It is possible that a country sort of decides unilaterally to start deploying it because it is cheap.

[00:30:23] Ed Whittingham: The dispersal methods aren't that complicated. You can. Pretty much use existing technology and it might be a bo against a lot of people dying or in the case of ministry for the future, tens of millions of people dying in a single, uh, extreme heat event. One thing though, I want to, I want to go back to you because it is very plausible and I think it's very near term, is I really loved in the book your, your exploration of Inequality and the social satire on privilege.

[00:30:53] Ed Whittingham: Crisis before in our pre-chat we're talking about, I think the great book that Kirsten McDougall has written called She's a Killer in which she coins this term wealthy, geez, people who flee with wealth to New Zealand, away from, uh, places that are in real climate crisis. You write about things like luxury apocalypse bunkers that the uber wealthy a bit built over the country.

[00:31:17] Ed Whittingham: Biophilic experienced pods for the obscenely wealthy, I'm quoting you your book directly now. Environmental exposure therapy for the, uh, so nostalgic 1%. The wealthy starting to protect and insulate themselves against the worst effects of climate change through some adaptation method is really happening now.

[00:31:36] Ed Whittingham: Yeah. So I'd love to know more just about your research around that. To your question around neuro fiddling, while Rome burned earlier on, this is really a case of another reference. It's like the Titanic's class separated lifeboats. Tell us more about that, because I, that was a fascinating part of, of the collection.

[00:31:55] Ashley Shelby: Oh, wow. Well, thank you. Um. Again, it, it was sort of a challenge when the speculative seems to become documentary in real time. And you know, I, by the time, actually this book was published last summer, I took a couple things out because I felt like it seemed too on point because it was happening. There was a, in my Craigslist ad chapter, I mean, not were really chapters, but my, my Craigslist, um, add.

[00:32:20] Ashley Shelby: There was a, uh, support group for recently displaced, you know, millionaires from Newport Beach, California. And, you know, we had these fires. Gosh, I mean, it's these disasters come one right on top of the other. So it's sometimes seems like it was a long time ago, but the, the California fires that just absolutely ravaged many, many neighborhoods, obviously, um, of all different, you know, socioeconomic state, but the, the really wealthy folks too.

[00:32:45] Ashley Shelby: Their homes are bringing you down. And it was very interesting to see the media focus on these burned out mansions instead of showing us homes. Um, in the middle class neighborhoods. Interviews were so often with wealthy white homeowners, celebrity homes that got damaged were were always highlighted. You know, I thought that little section in that Craigslist ad, like if someone reads it next year, it's gonna seem like, what is this?

[00:33:09] Ashley Shelby: It's not gonna feel speculative. I think that. Again, when these were written, it was in the, the first Trump term and then in the, in Biden's term, what we're seeing right now is just cartoonish in terms of this, this wealth gap. It almost feels like it's something somebody would've written speculatively, the, the way things are going, and so I did not anticipate.

[00:33:31] Ashley Shelby: That, that seemed to have accelerated over the course of just months, or it was always happening, but it was just more carefully hidden. I'm not sure, which I'm thinking is probably the latter, but I absolutely feel that in addition to these, you know, I put this in quotes, the apocalypse being monetized, um, and sold back to us, which I feel so sure that that's what's going to happen as we face more climate, um, disasters.

[00:33:58] Ashley Shelby: The wealthy are. Already starting to hoard resources. They're already building towns, um, in, uh, I think it's either California or Nevada that are gonna have very high walls. They have access to resources. We don't, I, I'm sure they're going to, uh, try to gain control over, over things like water sources.

[00:34:15] Ashley Shelby: Paolo, uh, magical loopy who wrote the Water knife, um, which is a work of climate fiction set in the Fort Corner states. It's about water wars between the. Those four states, and that was published eight years ago, maybe. Things like that also now start to seem plausible. You know, we start to see people marshaling resources and who's gonna own what.

[00:34:35] Ashley Shelby: You know, a luxury bunker underground no longer seems like a stretch, especially when we know they are already doing that. Um, and then for what purpose? You know, my son asked me the other day, he's like, you know, these billionaires, they're like building bunkers and they're building spaceships to like get off the planet and yet.

[00:34:51] Ashley Shelby: They're helping accelerate toward an uninhabitable planet. He's like, I get that they want even more money. He's like, but how is this even good for them? Because they can't live. They're human too. They can't live in a planet like this. Do you wanna live underground, you know, for 80 years? Is that their plan?

[00:35:08] Ashley Shelby: And I said, I think. What we're looking at is a mental illness. We're looking at something's not right. It, it, it, it doesn't make sense how they're operating. It's as if they don't believe they're human. It's as if they don't believe they're one of us and it's just like the movie don't look up. You know, at the end of the day, maybe they do, maybe they do survive, but what are they surviving to?

[00:35:31] Ashley Shelby: What happens when they get on the other side? So that is something I think about a lot. I tend to think it's inevitable. Unless there's kind of like a reckoning, um, where. The rest of us sort of say enough. 

[00:35:44] Roger Thompson: It's great you brought up, don't look up because, um, I'm just now realizing, and I hadn't thought about that book in relation to this, but the feeling I had after that is much like the feeling I had after reading your book.

[00:35:56] Roger Thompson: And I hadn't thought about that till you just mentioned that, but it's. I laughed more during your book because these things, but again, as I kinda mentioned earlier, I'd laugh, but on some of them, some of the Craigslist ads in particular, some of the descriptions of the absurdity of some of these studies being done, you know, and then I, but I'd close the book and I'd just be gnawing at me still kind of like.

[00:36:16] Roger Thompson: Yeah, but I'm a little afraid this isn't entirely not plausible. Probably like, like this isn't entirely speculative. It doesn't, there's enough grounding there. And, and that I think is a real master stroke on your part. Right. And regardless of what the future portends, the fact that you've left us with this sense of, no, this is, this is viable.

[00:36:35] Roger Thompson: Right. This is thing, and this is probably where I kind of, I pivot as, as Ed knows, you know, my, my trainings in rhetoric, where I'm interested in persuasion and how we're trying to. Persuade people to think about climate, how we're trying to get people to act in certain ways, which is the goal of persuasion.

[00:36:50] Roger Thompson: And so I guess I want to pose that question to you, which I do to a lot of the writers who we visit with is, you know, who do you see this book able to persuade or, or do you, do you care about that? Do you, do you want 'em to. Simply feel, but surely given the, the content of what you're, have, you, you want people to, I mean, you've got, I assume that's a fictional autobiographical Ashley who, who appears here, right?

[00:37:12] Roger Thompson: That is not a static observer, that isn't a person of real agency. So I'm curious about who are you trying to reach here? 

[00:37:20] Ashley Shelby: So that's a very interesting question because I usually answer it as a, an artist, which is, uh, that I feel really strongly that once I put something out in the world, it's no longer in my control.

[00:37:31] Ashley Shelby: And, and what you take from it is completely valid, and it's a conversation between us, but I don't get to dictate the terms. Um, I don't get to persuade you. I don't get to tell you what I meant. If someone says, you know, oh, you know, I see, you know, MIRI as a fable about the dangers of ai. I'm not gonna look at that person and say, that is completely wrong.

[00:37:52] Ashley Shelby: I'm, that's not what I was trying to do. I'm gonna say, that's so interesting. Can you tell me why you think that? How did you come to that? Because that was, was what was true for them. I, I, I'm pretty clear-eyed about this particular book. I had very little expectation. Of a wide greeter ship. Um, one, because it is sort of structurally odd.

[00:38:12] Ashley Shelby: It, it has a lot of different things in it that for some people they would, they like that, you know, there's some bite-sized stuff. They don't have to, you know, sit down for 30 minutes and, and finish a chapter, uh, except Miri, you know, which is the novelette, uh, that opens it. But there's others who, like I mentioned in, in our pre-chat, might, if they don't think about climate change a lot, if it's not important to them.

[00:38:35] Ashley Shelby: They find it depressing. Um, I had a, a book club of older ladies tell me that, um, that they could only read one page a night, you know, just as a writer. No writer wants to hear that, but I knew it wasn't because of the writing. I knew it was because there's something in them that knows it's true. They won't say it, but they know this is a problem.

[00:38:54] Ashley Shelby: They don't want, they 

[00:38:55] Ed Whittingham: feel like if they said that they missed the satire. 

[00:38:57] Ashley Shelby: Yes. I think, you know, uh, and to be honest, I'm not even sure how may finished it, but, um, that, that is the one thing that I wanted to make sure was part of this, was that I don't survive this life without humor. Even even dark humor.

[00:39:11] Ashley Shelby: I had hoped that was the one thing I had hoped that would leaven, some of it were those moments, but who it would persuade, I don't really see. And, and that's a, like a larger conversation about where art sort of functions in this conversation about climate and storytelling. I don't know that art can persuade, I think art.

[00:39:30] Ashley Shelby: It can illuminate corners that perhaps were dark to certain people. And I think that's pretty much like all it can do, it can illuminate and it can move. But in terms of persuasion, I think that's a more complicated process. I think it would take more than a book to do that unless, you know, unless it's like a great non-fiction book, you know, like Elizabeth Colbert's books or you know, um, you know, Catherine Hayhoe and, and so that's sort of where I fall on that.

[00:39:53] Ashley Shelby: But I also empathize with people who find it hard to read apocalyptic scenarios about. Climate change, and there's a lot of them. In fact, there's more now where there's kinda more realistic or near future fiction about climate. But until recently, it was almost all a hundred years out and it was all very apocalyptic.

[00:40:13] Ashley Shelby: Kim Stanley Robinsons was probably one of the first to have some sort of hopeful, like. Aspect to it, but that's hard to read when it doesn't feel like science fiction anymore. Science fiction. There's a distance and you're like, oh, wow, that'll never happen. So I can comfortably read this knowing that this will never come, you know, to, to my existence.

[00:40:31] Ashley Shelby: But climate change, apocalyptic fiction. It can be very hard to read now because it feels like a reminder of what, for some people, like we feel is inevitable, and yet we don't know what we're gonna do. So that's another reason why I was not gonna write a novel, you know, said in the future about climate change, because I wouldn't have even read it.

[00:40:51] Ashley Shelby: I, I just, it hurt, it almost hurts too much. But this being so, having such short aspects to it, it's almost like, you know, like you could take it, take it like a page at a time. 

[00:41:02] Ed Whittingham: And, and just to pick up on a couple, you know, the Winfield Scott Case study or they don't tell you where to put the pain. And I guess those climate feel case studies, just in terms of like your temporal structure.

[00:41:16] Ed Whittingham: I really liked how you would walk people essentially through the decades and where they were at in their personal journeys by extension, where the world was at in terms of a, a, a changing climate, perhaps to you, to the, the book. Club ladies, that one might, it did have this kind of Stephen King esque part, and I, I really, as I talked about before, I love the blending of the uber rich and privilege in crisis.

[00:41:42] Ed Whittingham: The, the self and spoiler alert, the, the story of the story of self amputation as a form of penance that. Difficult and yet fascinating and I'll practice. I have a higher pain threshold when it comes to the, uh, the slightly morbid. But going back to, to Murray, dear listener to this podcast, I hope you become a dear reader of honeymoons and temporary locations.

[00:42:03] Ed Whittingham: It's an exquisitely beautiful story. It is with a really interesting hook and. Interesting references, you know, like you've got just the, the reference to St. VI is dance and blood soaked shoes. So, and, and the PS is beautiful. On one hand, you know, you might be get hitting upside the head with some of the concepts, but it, it is just readable, flowy, prose and that story in particular.

[00:42:28] Ed Whittingham: And as good, it's short because you can't put it down mid story. You, you just. Once you start reading it, I was hooked and you just gotta read it and kudos. And that's not the only, like, that's the, the whole book. And, and I, I, I'll say again, I love your experimentation with a form, with all blending these, all these difficult re rhetorical devices, it makes for a really compelling collection and unlike anything that I've really read before.

[00:42:52] Ashley Shelby: That's so overwhelming, and that means so much coming from both of you as accomplished as you are and what you do, uh, in, in your work. That truly means so much to me. And, um. Like when I tell my dad he is gonna be so happy because he knows that to me, having people at the highest level of rhetoric and English, and obviously climate science, um, that, that's like, Hey, I did it, dad.

[00:43:14] Ashley Shelby: You know, I, 

[00:43:15] Roger Thompson: yeah, Ashley, you did it. You did it. You did it. If you. If you need a letter, we'll send, send one for your dad so he can take a look. 

[00:43:22] Ed Whittingham: Yeah, yeah. And on a family note, like just before we jumped on on this recording, I went to my daughter who, it's a rainy day here, so we're supposed to go out for a bike ride instead.

[00:43:30] Ed Whittingham: She's on the couch going through the Wordle archive. I showed her, I'm like, you really should read this. This is a great work. Fiction. You know, it's, it's difficult with an 18-year-old daughter to influence her anything, but I'm gonna come back and, and so that is also another testament, like I'm recommending it to my immediate family, my daughter, and I know that she won't get weirded out by it or she won't get put off by it, but she'll find it engaging and ultimately insightful around what could be around the corner, whether in the next couple years or the next decades.

[00:44:02] Ashley Shelby: Well think, and you know what? Maybe one day my teenagers will read it. I have been unsuccessful in persuading them yet, even though it's, to them wasn't enough of a bribe, apparently. 

[00:44:11] Roger Thompson: Well, I think that's actually, and I just, I just am just echo real quickly how wonderful the collection is, how diverse it is, but also I just want to, again, emphasize what Ed said about me, which I find a really, really compelling, I don't know who else you were up against on that Hugo Award, but I, I would've, uh, put you up top for sure.

[00:44:30] Roger Thompson: And so if you don't have time to grab anything else, grab uri, but it's gonna hook you and then you'll grab the rest all. So, so we just really wanna thank you, Ashley, for taking the time and, and sharing your talents with us. They're considerable and they're thought provoking. If your goal was to leave us with, uh, some strong feelings, not just about climbing and the craft of writing, but about ourselves as actors in this world, you've done.

[00:44:53] Roger Thompson: So really want to thank you for taking time to speak with us today. Thanks so much. 

[00:44:58] Ed Whittingham: Keep writing, keep writing and, and to, to echo. Sorry, one last point. It, it's a glimpse of plausible. Climate affected futures, but in a way that's not demotivating. If anything, it's motivating. Yep. Agreed. 

[00:45:10] Ashley Shelby: Agreed. Thank you so much.

[00:45:11] Ashley Shelby: And also, I just have to, on behalf of all of us writers, thank you so much for paying attention to the art that's coming out in this moment. Um, it's very hard to be a creator right now. And, um, it sometimes feel like, feels like nobody even has the, the, the space in their brain to, to read anymore. Um, which I, it's understandable, but folks like, you know, librarians and independent bookstore owners and, and folks like you who do this type of work, you help keep.

[00:45:37] Ashley Shelby: The written word alive, right? That you help keep, um, creators creating. And so I just want to thank you for your attention to it and, and just your generosity of spirit in, in talking about these texts. 

[00:45:48] Roger Thompson: That's lovely. Thank you, Ashley. So, uh, that closes up for this time. We'll see you next time at the next Climate book reviews and, uh, we'll see you soon.

[00:45:57] Roger Thompson: Bye-bye. Bye-Bye 

[00:45:58] Ashley Shelby: bye.