Honeymoons in Temporary Locations
Eclectic, experimental, and wildly imaginative climate fictions from a familiar world hauntingly transformed
Climate disaster–induced fugue states, mutinous polar bears, support groups for recently displaced millionaires, men who hear trees, and women who lose their wives on environmental refugee resettlement trips. In these dispatches from a weirding world, the absurd and fantastic are increasingly indistinguishable from reality. Exploring this liminal moment, Ashley Shelby’s collection of climate fictions imagines a near future that is both unnervingly familiar and subversively strange.
Set in the same post-climate-impact era, these stories range from playfully satirical to poignantly humane, bending traditional narrative forms and coming together into a brilliant and unusual contemplation of our changing world. Featuring the Hugo-nominated novelette “Muri,” Honeymoons in Temporary Locations processes the unthinkable through riotous inventions like guided tours of submerged cities, Craigslist ads placed by climate refugees, and cynical pharmaceutical efforts to market a drug to treat solastalgia, the existential distress caused by environmental change.
Shelby reengineers the dystopic bleakness that characterizes so much climate fiction by embracing an eclectic experimentalism leavened with humor, irony, and the inevitable bathos that characterizes the human experience. Unexpected and clever, this innovative collection confirms her status as a visionary writer whose work expands the forms, attitudes, and possibilities of climate fiction.
Ashley Shelby is a novelist, short story writer, and former environmental journalist. Her debut novel, South Pole Station, was a New York Times Editor’s Pick, a Shelf Awareness Book of the Year, and winner of the Lascaux Prize in Fiction. She is also author of the nonfiction book Red River Rising: The Anatomy of a Flood and the Survival of an American City. She lives in the Twin Cities.
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