Advice for writing cli-fi

I’m often asked about how I devise and deliver dramatic action when I’m writing against a backdrop of climate degradation, new technology, ecological crises and opportunities. It’s a good question because all those issues require technical or scientific knowledge that not every reader will share.

Because I research it all very thoroughly, I have a folder on my laptop where articles from newspapers and journals are all referenced. Every one of them can provide me with drama and intrigue – and a basis in fact. The key is to find a way to make these authoritative predictions about where we’re headed into live action on the page, not a boring cut-away to a documentary interlude.

I’ll give you an example from The Coming Darkness, the first volume of my trilogy. An agent of the French security services is undercover, working in a desalination plant on the North African coast. He shows a visiting dignitary round the plant, allowing me to share the novel tech I’ve researched, which will be normal in 2037.

In the second volume, The Coming Storm, I’ve used the growing sector of personalised healthcare as a way for a character to be monitored. The unique treatment she needs is crucial for her own wellbeing, but it’s also a form of surveillance. And that drama extends further when someone very close to her is kept out of the loop for malign reasons.

Here’s an example from the third volume, The Coming Fire. One of Alex’s allies – the woman he loves, Mariam Jordane – is unable to help him because air traffic has been bricked by a software attack. She manages to get access to an experimental plane that will still fly – but wonders if it will be reliable, sharing the drama and excitement of the novel aircraft.

To finish, here’s another example from book three of the trilogy, The Coming Fire. Much of the action is set in Haiti in the Caribbean, a desperately poor nation blighted by hurricanes, post-pandemic diseases, deforestation, disintegrating government and violent gangs. That’s the landscape that my hero, Alex, reveals to the reader as he moves through it, discovering it on the reader’s behalf.

That’s the key. What you need the reader to know has to be discovered by the characters – they constitute the light that illuminates the dark map of your imaginary world.