I had a short story published over the summer. It’s called “Will We Notice the Dawn When It Comes?” and it appeared in “The End of the World” Issue of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. A huge thank you to editors Anna Evans and Marcel Krueger. You can read the story online for free here.

It’s another climate fiction story, originally drafted in early 2025, which means it took about 18 months and seven attempts to find a home online. (Seven seems to be my magic submission number.) I wrote it because I was thinking about tipping points: the idea that at a certain moment, carbon emissions (or other types of environmental damage) will suddenly become irreversible – and from that point on, humanity is doomed. This might’ve already happened.

If we’ve passed a tipping point, where was I the moment it happened? When the last CO₂ molecule necessary for our destruction entered our ailing atmosphere, did I feel some primal shiver in my bones? Or was I just going about a normal day, making coffee, worrying about money, planning for a future that no longer existed?

I find this concept suffocating. The idea we can save ourselves, we can save ourselves – until we suddenly can’t. From one moment to the next human extinction switches from hypothetical to inevitable. It’s even more horrifying because, in the context of climate change, that “we” is not at all collective. In practice, only the richest, most powerful people on the planet have control over whether a tipping point is reached.

But writing towards oblivion felt like a grim and thankless exercise. Would such a story communicate anything useful about the climate crisis? It might just reproduce fear. What if I turned the concept on its head? What if, instead, I wrote towards hope?

Writing Towards Hope

 In “Will We Notice the Dawn When It Comes” the world is saved in the opening line; some far-future, hitherto undiscovered technology reverses the effects of climate change. Anya and Daniel are hunkered down in an abandoned office block somewhere outside of Boston, MA, believing the world to have ended.

(It is worth me saying here I don’t think purely technological solutions to climate change are worth putting much faith in at this stage. They certainly shouldn’t be an excuse to refuse behavioural change, especially not by corporations or governments.)

Anya’s mother has just died. The couple’s principal concerns are food, shelter and grief. Anya is struggling to envision a future, to find joy or hope in life. She is stuck, powerless and fading.

Anya and Daniel have no control over whether the world is saved. It’s all thanks to a Japanese research team, half a world away. But hope is strongest, at its most necessary, when one has little to no power: I hope my team wins; I hope my friend will stop drinking; I hope, tomorrow, the rain will stop. How do we pull ourselves through the mire when bog-mud clings to our clothes? How can we accept the world as it is while simultaneously fighting to change it?

Anya looks for answers in the beauty of the storm, the misguided courage of her dying mother, the touch of Daniel’s hand on her shoulder. She never finds concrete answers, but she does find ways to go on living. To chain one moment into the next.

The story concludes with my first-ever published sex scene, a writer’s rite of passage if ever there was one.

By reversing the tipping point, I hoped to communicate something about the climate crisis. If humanity (or at least human civilisation as we know it) does seal its own destruction, it will not feel like a major moment. It will feel like a normal day: like the food we are eating or the sleep we are not getting; the mother we are mourning or the lover we are holding at night.

I’ve moved on from writing climate fiction for the moment. My more recent output has been focused on masculinity and fatherhood. I tend to use writing as processing, and this story is the culmination of two years of reflections on the question of how to find hope in the climate crisis. It’s no surprise I found hope where I often do: in appreciating the people around me; in living my one and only life.

Other Great Contributors to “The End of the World” Issue

“Three Poems” by Kylie Ayn Yockey – Canada-based creative Kylie Ayn Yockey had me from her opening lines: “fuck the wild / build me cities / of millennial pink”.  Her breathless, insistent poetry takes you right up to humanity’s destruction and still makes you feel like you can achieve miracles. More of her work here.

“Horribilis: The Last Grizzly Bears of the West” by Jimmy Fike – Haunting photography of the sites at which the last grizzly bears were killed in various American states. A reminder that as much as we can worry about environmental loss in the future, so much of it is already in the past.

“What Might It Be?” by Stacy Boone – Flash fiction that also writes towards hope. There are so many ways for the world to end, but when it finally happens, someone, somewhere, will still be creating. More on her Substack.