A novel idea about ending climate change
Sherborn native Nick Fuller Googins’ book envisions a future “where humanity rallies and saves the planet”
Sometimes, when first-time novelist Nick Fuller Googins is speaking with a book club, he’ll forget. His book, “The Great Transition,” has sparked a growing firestorm of conversation about what our near future could look like after we humans have solved the climate crisis.
The group will be discussing the science of rising sea levels and rampant wildfires. Economics. Politics. President Biden’s American Climate Corps, and whether the program will be an adequate response to the problem of global warming. And by his own admission, Fuller Googins will forget — however briefly — that he’s actually been invited to talk about his novel, and the fictional characters he created.
Those characters — husband-and-wife activists Larch and Kristina and their 15-yearold daughter, Emi — are the reason Fuller Googins’s version of climate fiction (known as “clifi”), published in August, has reached such a receptive audience. The 40-year-old Sherborn native (who now lives in southern Maine with his wife, Liz Mulkey, where he’s an elementary school teacher) says he learned the power of solidarity while studying at Boston College.
In fact, his involvement with a social justice group at BC got him suspended for his senior year. A child of activists — his great-great-grandmother was a suffragette who once chained herself to the gate at the Massachusetts State House — Fuller Googins participated in protests against the second Iraq War and to demand wider LGBTQ+ rights on campus.
When campus police arrived to break up a party, Fuller Googins was arrested. He believed he was harassed because they knew him to be an agitator. Despite the suspension, he eventually earned his teaching certificate at BC.
“That was my first experience of being part of a mass movement,” Fuller Googins said recently. “What an exhilarating feeling to be working with other people for a larger cause.”
He compared it to “being in a stadium of sports fans after Game 7, pouring out into the streets, singing and dancing together. Really, it’s when I felt most alive as a human being. And I wanted to capture that in the novel.”
In the book, Kristina and Larch meet not-so-cute: She’s working as a “hotshot” firefighter. He’s part of a team called Forest Corps, which rescues the firefighters when they become trapped. Kristina has permanent scarring on her face from the flames.
Years later, they’re raising their child in Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, which has become a “megacity” filled with climate refugees from around the globe. Day Zero is approaching. It’s an international holiday celebrating the anniversary of the day the climate conservationists finally reached net zero — balancing greenhouse gas emissions with their removal from the atmosphere.
Larch was once a minor celebrity due to his role on a reality show about the work of the environmental corps, building sea walls, demolishing abandoned neighborhoods, and harnessing energy from the planet’s near-constant hurricanes. Now, though, he’s become a bit of a homebody, devoted to cooking and caring for his daughter.
Kristina, on the other hand, does not think the war has been won.
“We can never forget what they did,” she tells her daughter, who is doing research for a school paper. “To us. To our only planet. People talk now as if the Crisis was an inevitable act of nature. As if it wasn’t preventable. But in every corporate boardroom, in every central bank — they knew precisely what they were doing. They hope history will forget. They hope young people will learn about Day Zero and emissions and victory. But we can never forget.”
Rather than celebrate Day Zero, every year Kristina leaves her family to volunteer for public service. When a coordinated attack on several “climate criminals” — the captains of industry, now elderly, who stood by as the crisis worsened — shocks the world, Emi and Larch go on a mission to find Kristina, and find out what she’s really been up to.
“I had the idea for a ‘hopeful’ climate crisis, where humanity rallies and saves the planet,” Fuller Googins said. Before he wrote a word, he fleshed out the world he imagined by spending several months reading about real-life predictions for a net-zero future — a mass migration toward the poles, gravity storage warehouses, kelp farms that remove carbon from the atmosphere.
“I feel like it’s barely science fiction,” Fuller Googins said of his book. “It’s science fiction lite.”
His upbringing in Sherborn helped shape his beliefs about the natural world.
“I grew up in the woods,” he said. “We couldn’t see our neighbors. I remember as a kid, acid rain and the ozone layer, the rain forest — I remember being very concerned about all that.”
Today, he uses global warming as a teaching tool.
“I weave climate education into reading, science, social studies,” he said. “I try to make it a part of the curriculum. It’s probably going to be the singlebiggest challenge they face in their lives, so it would be strange for me to not bring it up, to pretend it’s not happening.”
One of his students recently pointed out the window and said, “Look. It’s almost Christmas, and it’s not snowing. It must be the climate crisis.”
Fuller Googins has heard from a few parents who object to their children studying the subject — “2 percent, maybe,” he said. “There’s a very small minority who are concerned that, in their opinion, this is a very debatable, controversial topic.” In those instances, he said, he’ll offer the child an alternative course of study.
Besides teaching about the climate crisis, it’s important to him to show the students that there are people “who are fighting for a better future, and that they can be a part of that. You don’t have to be powerful — just regular people trying to change the world.”
His students, he said, “love Greta Thunberg,” the young Swedish activist who began protesting climate inaction at age 15. In “The Great Transition,” she’s known as “Mama Greta.”
The book has become a favorite of booksellers, who have been pressing it into the hands of their customers. It “shines with morally complex — but ultimately hopeful — examinations of humanity, environmentalism, capitalism, family, and much more,” according to Brookline Booksmith’s Cameron Vanderwerf. “Not only is this a smart and profound novel, but it’s quite the page-turner as well.”
Fuller Googins has been overwhelmed by the response. At Simon & Schuster, the parent company of his publisher, Atria Books, “The Great Transition” was chosen as the company’s “Top Shelf ” pick for the summer season.
“That’s voted on by all the sales associates, the marketers, the person in charge of selling to airports, or to Target,” he explained. “I felt so honored that they gave such a big push, which a lot of debut authors might not enjoy. I’ve been nothing but grateful every step of the way.”
He already has his second book under contract. That book, however, will not be another glimpse into the future.
“It’s strictly realistic fiction,” he said. “It’s set in 2015.”