Some might argue today’s children are already growing up in a post-climate change apocalypse. Here in Florida, they’d have lots of evidence to point to; too much evidence, really, to fully describe here. Still, it’s nothing like the landscapes portrayed in two short stories published almost thirty years apart.
For the protagonists of Rick Wilber’s “Finals” and Karen Russell’s “The Gondoliers,” notions of maturity and “coming of age” have been radically reshaped by climate change. “Finals” first appeared in Pineapple Press’ 1991 anthology Florida Science Fiction: Subtropical Speculations. “The Gondoliers” was first published in Tin House in 2019 and appeared in Russell’s 2020 collection Orange World. Both stories envision (in disturbingly similar ways) a future Florida destroyed by sea level rise and warming temperatures. Against these harsh settings, the characters who were born after the state has been devastated by catastrophic sea level rise find comfort and normalcy in situations that have been drastically altered from those their parents’ and grandparents’ generations. This suggests a sense of resilience and pragmatism that better equips them for survival compared to their elders’ mourning the lost paradise that Florida used to be. Both stories function as dire warnings for what might await Florida in the future, but both also evince optimism in the ways that these challenges will be met by future generations.
This last part is key. The stories’ plots do not come off as explicitly “optimistic”, that’s for sure. In “Finals,” Tampa is partially submerged, the US relies on massive foreign aid to continue functioning as a society, and the teenage protagonist Sean-Tomas is nervous about having to ace his upcoming final exams – which will determine if he’s qualified to be a service worker in one of the exclusive Zones for rich tourists. In “The Gondoliers,” Miami, now known as Bahia Rosa, is totally underwater, and its inhabitants live a fragile, watery existence among the islands and upper levels of buildings that still rise above sea level. The young narrator, nicknamed “Blister,” was born seven years after a devastating flood “rolled across the peninsula.” She makes a living ferrying passengers around the area in a gondola while avoiding the areas polluted with toxic algae. (She also, along with her gondolier sisters, possesses a talent for echolocation that borders on telepathy. Whole other story there. Read it!) Her final fare on the day the story takes place is an older man who helped build the failed seawall that didn’t stop the flood and wants a ride out to that remote ruin, in order to die there.
See? Not really cheerful stuff. But what I liked here, especially in “The Gondoliers,” was the evocation of life continuing on, thriving even, albeit in forms that the older characters can’t adjust to or comprehend. “The world didn’t end,” reads graffiti on the wall of a half-underwater building that Blister ferries through. And readers, when they see the love shared by Blister and her siblings and the waters teeming with sea life, will believe it.
I lament that too much of the discourse around not just climate change, but any kind of change, is often laden with fear, frustration, grief, and a sense of tremendous impending loss. That’s natural, since we understandably want to hold on to what we have, what has worked for us in the past and present; uncertain futures create anxiety. But progress, these stories show, can be measured in ways that are less tangible than ruined cities. Sean-Tomas of “Finals” and Blister of “The Gondoliers” are the most content and well-adjusted characters in their respective stories, to a large degree. “Empires fall. That’s the way it is,” Sean-Tomas figures, while reflecting on the world history he’s learned in school, and wonders why his grandfather can’t accept that. And the young trying, often vainly, to persuade the old to let go of the past and accept current realities is a trope not just of storytelling, but of human history.
