feature image photo of wildfires by David McNew/Getty Images
In Gabrielle Korn’s Yours for the Taking, set a mere 25 years from the year in which we currently struggle to live, a reclusive billionaire / women’s rights activist is selected to preside over The Inside Project, a weather-safe, city-sized structure built atop Manhattan’s decaying bones. The world has succumbed to its predictable, climate-change-enabled demise, and few sustainable solutions remain. An ostensibly “fair” lottery system is established to select who can live Inside and whomst will be left to fend for themselves in the wasteland. As often seems to be the case when anybody is given power, anywhere, Jacqueline’s does not, in fact, intend to preside over an equal system of admission, but rather to build a new society in line with her own personal feelings about what society needs. Only women were permitted Inside, per Jacqueline’s political agenda. At first, her utopia really does feel utopian. Until of course it doesn’t.
The Shutouts, Korn’s sequel to Yours for the Taking, was released this past December, and it is the story of what happened to those who didn’t make it into climate-safe spaces like Inside or Jacqueline’s spaceship. Most humans, it turns out, ended up as “climate refugees,” loose bands of chosen family traveling the country together, escaping an ongoing series of wildfires, hurricanes and floods. When Ava and Brook escape The Inside Project, they join these others, stories crossing and mixing as time plows forwards. The Shutouts also follows Max, a nonbinary teenager raised in a cult called the Winter Liberation Army, a group who found their own way to live in a climate-ravaged world. On another timeline, starting in 2041, a computer genius with a rebellious past is blazing across the country, chased by climate catastrophes, writing letters to her daughter, sharing stories about the uncertain, chaotic years that led up to the whole world turning on its own head.
It was a weird coincidence of timing that I was scheduled to interview Gabrielle about The Shutouts the same week that a “wind event” led to a series of devastating wildfires across the city where we both live, coming for mansions with infinity pools and city views, for the studios of young artists, for beloved family homes in the hills of Altadena. I’d found myself thinking not infrequently of The Shutouts that week — of queer kids tearing through the forest, fucking in tents, waiting for each other in the woods, of a world in which home wasn’t a place, just a group of people you loved, and were still looking for.
Riese: As we’re having this conversation, we’re on the tenth day of wildfires in LA. I’ve found myself thinking about your book a lot — specifically the group of people running around Canada, hopping from one safe location to another while being chased by weather events. I keep thinking — “is that our future? Is that what we’re going towards?” What has been going on in your mind, as the person who wrote this book, as fires tear through this city?
Gabrielle: I think, for the first time, I started to wonder if I set it too far in the future.
Riese: Oh, really?
Gabrielle: Because in the world of these books, LA has already burned to the ground by the 2040s, and just this week, that didn’t feel that far off. It feels like all it’s going to take is one fucking palm tree to scatter the embers, and there it all goes. But also — The Shutouts is a worst-case scenario, and it’s a worst-case scenario based on the potential for inaction, and whether or not Trump will be able to drill on more federal lands, as he promised.
I try to be optimistic. Most of the time, I’m able to channel hope when I think about all the amazing things that scientists are working on, and then there are weeks like this week, where I really struggle with imagining a future that doesn’t just feel worse and worse.
Riese: Do you ever feel a mental shift in your head from feeling hopeful about what scientists are working on to combat climate change towards wondering what they’re working on to allow us to exist despite it?
Gabrielle: Well, we need to prevent climate change that we can’t adapt to. While I was doing research for this book, that’s what I kept coming up against — “What is it actually going to look like?” and it’s like, “Well, it won’t look like anything to us, because we won’t be able to survive it.”
Riese: Right.
Gabrielle: So, that’s where the fiction comes in.
Riese: I keep seeing these pictures of the Getty, right? And reading about how it will survive the fires because of its state-of-the-art technology. Obviously a person can’t survive in the same locked steel vault that a piece of art can. But I do think of your book when I think about the Getty, too — a world where climate change ravages everybody, but the most wildly wealthy people can survive it. Like the Inside Project — an exclusive, weather-safe, enclosed city. But of course I mean the ultra wealthy, like the Gettys and Jeff Bezos can build weather safe vaults, I’m not sure if Anna Faris has that cash on hand.
Gabrielle: Right, even in our lifetimes — you survive if you have the money to get yourself out, and not everybody does. And so, to me, it’s becoming clearer and clearer how class is what’s going to determine who survives.
I think the billionaires have already, literally, built their bunkers. They have already future-proofed their lives and their children’s lives, and then there is an entire upper middle class of people who will also probably find a way to be okay, unless their house catches fire, but this is the class of people who can afford to rebuild or move somewhere else. Anything short of that is becoming less and less sufficient for survival.
Riese: When it comes to writing climate fiction, how much would you say that writing about this future that you’ve imagined involves researching the past?
Gabrielle: Not a lot of looking back. I mostly was researching currently developing climate technologies. The stuff that seems really futuristic in the book is actually real. All I invented was the super bean. Everything the Winter Liberation Army [an insular group who survives climate change through their own self-created technology] has is real, including magnetized houses for flood zones.
All of this incredible technology has so little funding and so little publicity, so what’s in the book is very much a metaphor for the feeling I had while discovering all of this. There are people pulling carbon out of the air and putting it back in the ground. Why isn’t that getting a gajillion dollars in funding to just do?
Riese: Right, like nobody truly cares about the future, long term. So — how would you describe the relationship between climate justice, so to speak, and climate fiction?
Gabrielle: I think that the barrier to entry is lower in climate fiction. I think you can kind of Trojan Horse your way into getting people to care about climate justice through fictional stories. I’ve been kind of shocked at the amount of really well-educated, really well-informed people who have told me that these books were the first time they felt alarmed about climate change.
I was worried that people wouldn’t want to be reading it or thinking about it right now, but I’ve had a lot of people reach out to me about it with increasing frequency.
Riese: Oh, that’s interesting. That’s always my instinct, too, when something is bad I want to get into stories about it, like reading pandemic fiction during the pandemic. So how do you see your work fitting into the overall lineage of climate fiction?
Gabrielle: I don’t know if climate fiction is the right lens to look at my work through. Yours for the Taking was a queer satire with climate change as a backdrop — The Shutouts, to me, is more of an examination of the problem with one-issue politics and using climate as an example, so I don’t know if it fits neatly into the canon. I think it fits more into dystopian fiction.
Riese: Right, in Yours for the Taking, you literally took everyone out of the climate, so it was no longer an active character. But in The Shutouts they were really out there! In the climate!
Gabrielle: I did want to show what was happening to America, and I read The Great Displacement by Jake Bittle, about what climate migration is going to start to look like, and it goes through every part of the country and says, “What’s going to happen here, in climate change?” I used that as a roadmap for Kelly’s journey. The specific places she stops are because I wanted to say, “This is what’s predicted to happen in those years.”
Riese: Did you ever read something and think like, “people need to know that this technology is happening so I will tell them about it in this novel”?
Gabrielle: I tried not to do that. I tried to keep the most important thing the story and the storytelling, because I think it gets annoying when you have an agenda. I would do anything to not be annoying.
Riese: So with Vero, we have a character with a really complicated relationship to upbringing and privilege. We see this a lot in activist or socialist groups, or queer groups, that there’ll be one person there with a lot of class privilege who makes it possible for everyone else to have access to resources, but when push comes to shove, that privileged upbringing can ultimately be really difficult to outrun. When the shit hits the fan, you see that sense of — i’m better than these other people, I know what’s right come out, or just the sense of someone who knows they have a bigger safety net than others, taking certain risks. Do you think anyone can truly betray, truly let go of that sense of privilege?
Gabrielle: I don’t think so. I think Vero thinks he’s doing good. But because of his upbringing, he also thinks that he should decide the future of the program. He’s so entitled under the guise of being an empowered leader. The others, who weren’t raised being told how special and perfect they are, didn’t think they should be making those decisions.
Riese: Switching gears here for a sec — a lot of this book is about chosen family, and how we support ourselves and each other through impossible times. Near the start, Camila talks about how she feels a constant need to know where all her people are, and to have them close. Do you imagine the future being a place where home is not so much a place, but people? We’re able to stay in touch with people that we can’t see, now, with technology, but in The Shutouts, there’s no technology, but there’s also no shared location.
Gabrielle: Camila is a character who fled her home when she’s 13, and her sister goes to space, and her mom dies on the side of the road. All she has is her aging father and the ragtag people they pick up along the way, and so, to me, it stands to reason that she would be very anxiously attached to everybody that she comes to love.
Even though they find this place to live and they settle in it for a few years, it’s like — she is a mess. She’s so scared, and she stays behind with Max out of care for Max, but also because how can she leave this place that has finally been her home? And so, I think all the characters struggle with the tension between where is safe, where they want to be, and who they want to be with. They don’t have the internet. They can’t call each other, and so the physical proximity is really important, and the promises they make to each other about coming back are really important,
Riese: That’s something usually happens in books about the past rather than the future — the sense that you just have to trust somebody is gonna come back to where you said you would wait for them or they said they would wait for you. But we used to do that all the time, every day!
Gabrielle: Yeah. It’s like making plans in the 90s.
Riese: “Yeah. I’ll see you at the mall at noon on Thursday,” and then you just got there, and either they showed up or they didn’t. You could call them from a payphone, but only if they were home.
Gabrielle: You asked at the beginning of this conversation about if I had looked into the past and I said, “No,” but I guess what I did look into is the fact that humans used to be migratory.
A lot of this book is about returning to a pre-industrial revolution, pre-agriculture way of living with the earth, which is you go where you can survive, and when you can’t survive there anymore, you go somewhere else, and that’s how humans live for more years than not.
Riese: But right now we’re all digging in our heels, and that’s not really realistic, I guess?
Gabrielle: Yeah. I mean, at the same time, I know I’m not cut out for life on the road.
Riese: I’m definitely not cut out for life on the road. I’m like, “I don’t even know what to put in my go-bag. Everything? I want to bring everything.”
Gabrielle: I’m like, “If I don’t have a really soft, warm, dark bedroom to sleep in, I am no use to you the next day.”
Riese: When people are like, “Those things can be replaced. They’re just things,” I’m like, “Well, but I really liked my things.” I feel like it should be okay for people to miss their things, let alone their homes.
Gabrielle: I think it is, and also, it takes time to acquire the right things. It’s not just like you can do it all in one shopping trip.
Riese: So when you talk about climate change doomers, which I assume some of that was inspired by doomsday preppers — do you think that mindset makes sense? Not the wealthy people building bunkers, but others who are literally prepping for it.
Gabrielle: I don’t think doomers are a preparation mindset. It’s more a mindset of, “We’re fucked, and there’s nothing we can do, so I’m not going to change any of my behaviors because climate change is happening.” There’s something kind of nihilistic about it.
Riese: Is that just as dangerous as denying it?
Gabrielle: It’s apples and oranges, because the doomers are doing nothing, but the people denying it are the ones in government who are fracking.
Riese: Right.
Gabrielle: So yeah, it doesn’t feel like a fair comparison. I mean, climate scientists say that they’re equally dangerous, because also, denialists’ minds can be changed, and it’s like, if you know about climate change and you still don’t want to change your behaviors — then honestly, fuck you.
Riese: What were the stories that you were the most excited to tell in this, that you feel like you didn’t give enough or that you didn’t have enough space for in the first one?
Gabrielle: I was excited to build out the world more and zero on in why the climate crisis was allowed to get so bad. I was glad that I was able to do that through Kelly’s storyline in The Shutouts.
Riese: What was your inspiration for wanting to create Max and for the Winter Liberation Army?
Gabrielle: I was specifically inspired by the animal rights movement of the early-2000s, which had a rampant sexism problem. I’m always interested in just playing with the idea of leftists who think they’re good, because they care passionately about one thing, and then treat the women among them like shit. That was compelling to me. Then, I was just thinking — what if this group continues and flourishes, because everyone else dies? What can fester and erode because these activists are given power over each other? Then with Max, I needed a character that you root for, who connects everyone.
Riese: That feels like a resonant theme throughout your work — people jumping in to do something “for good” only to learn it doesn’t really align with your ethics after all.
Gabrielle: If you’ve participated in capitalism in any way, I think it’s a constant compromise between what you believe in and what you need to survive. We all do it, and it doesn’t make you inherently bad because we live in a society.
Riese: One element of the very queer friend group that forms near the start of the book is that they’ve all experienced so much trauma. And they’re all experiencing a collective trauma together, which in a way we all did with the pandemic. So then these individual traumas are compounded — family experiences, gender stuff, splits with their families or communities — what’s the best thing that can come out of that, and what’s the worst thing that can come out of that?
Gabrielle: I think the best thing is finding the people who will actually take care of you and you will take care of through the trauma we’re all experiencing.
Riese: What’s the worst case scenario?
Gabrielle: I think it can lead to people having unrealistic expectations of each other. I think if you’re replacing a mommy shaped void in your heart, that’s a lot of pressure to put on someone, and I think that’s something queer people love to do to each other., We try to make each other parent each other. I guess that’s not a worst case scenario, because re-parenting is part of any relationship, but I don’t know, I guess in terms of post-pandemic trauma, I don’t know if we’re seeing the rise of the found family. I think we’re seeing loneliness.. I think we’re just isolating and watching TV for 10 hours, instead of going to the lesbian bar, because it’s closed now.
Riese: You’ve talked about working with your writers group on this book — how does that impact the writing process?
Gabrielle: With Yours for the Taking, I wrote in isolation and I felt really paranoid and superstitious about talking about it. Over the course of writing The Shutouts, I realized you have to talk about it and tell people about it. I really love getting feedback as I go. This book is about community, so it made a lot of sense to write it while being in community with other writers.
Riese: How do you decide what to disregard and what to keep?
Gabrielle: I can’t remember what I disregarded, but I’m sure it was a lot. You also have to be able to stay true to your vision while taking feedback, but a lot of practical feedback was given to me, and a lot of things that changed the book, like someone pointed out, I think the specific note was, “There is no way these crust punks are monogamous.”
Riese: Right, yeah. Fair! I feel like when I get feedback, I’m always like, “Well, they must be right. What do I know about anything?” How do you learn to trust your gut?
Gabrielle: You just have to. There was a moment with Hannah, my editor, who I love and is amazing, where we went back and forth about and she wasn’t thrilled with the chapter with the inbred family. She felt like it was too dark, but, and that was the only major change she wanted to make, and I really dug my heels in about it. I really felt like we needed something super dark and scary to explain why Inside was such an appealing option., and when I explained it to her, she agreed with me. We moved forward with that scene intact, and I think it ended up being one of the strongest parts of the book.
Riese: I agree!
Gabrielle: I think it’s just trusting how you feel about it.
Riese: Right even though I just said that I would take any feedback — you know your characters better than a reader, and not every reader is a close reader. I struggle to trust myself in all things but then, sometimes I do.
Sorry for the hard pivot here but — when you look at your book cover from a distance, do you ever think it’s a picture of a perfume bottle?
Gabrielle: It definitely looks like a cubed object, which I like.
Riese: So you’ve never looked at it from a distance and thought it looked like a perfume bottle?
Gabrielle: Not specifically. Have you?
Riese: Yeah, believe it or not. I’ve looked at it from a distance and thought, “Is that a perfume bottle?” But I love it. I really love the cover for this one. It’s really nice.
Gabrielle: Thank you. It’s funny that you bring up perfume, because there was someone in my writing group who decided to find a perfume for each book that everybody was working on.
Riese: Oh, that’s cute.
Gabrielle: And the one she found for The Shutouts has notes of gunpowder and sounded really stinky.
Riese: Well, I have a great idea for the design of that bottle.
