
What will a post-climate-disaster America look like? In Ashley Shelby’s short story collection, Honeymoons in Temporary Locations, the results range from devastating to absurd to all-too-plausible. This trifecta is what makes Shelby’s eclectic mix of stories unique in a genre that tends toward the dystopian.
First up is Muri, featuring talking polar bears being relocated to the South Pole from their home in Iqaluit, Canada. The transport is part of a secret intergovernmental relocation program to save the bears from climate-related extinction. When the bears mutiny, life and death take on an entirely different meaning. (Muri was reviewed by EcoLit Books in 2019, when it was first published.)
In the title story, Honeymoons in Temporary Locations, the narrator, a wealthy climate refugee, recounts her bizarre journey from storm-damaged New York City to “climate-stable Duluth” during which she loses the “Chapstick lesbian”-turned-wife she met at a dive bar. The story mixes laugh-out-loud humor with sharp commentary on inequality, government bureaucracy, and climate-change denialism.
Following the traditional stories are a series of short satirical works in varying formats. These envision a climate-disaster-changed world through Craigslist personal ads; sightseeing brochures to “vanished coastal cities”; a climate-crime podcast about a murdered tree; a café menu reminding patrons that “due to the simultaneous and total collapse of both the African and South American Arabica crops last year, coffee is used as a term of convenience and does not necessarily refer to coffee as we previously understood it”; and a pharmaceutical company’s marketing brief for “Climafeel,” a “recombinant DNA biologic that blunts the effects of solastalgia.”
Solastalgia, a term coined in 2005 by the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht, describes the specific distress human beings experience as the planet warms and the environment changes. In the final fictions in the collection, Shelby reimagines solastalgia as a mental illness and presents heartrending accounts of individuals struggling mightily to survive in their damaged environments.
Creative, original, and poignant, Shelby’s Honeymoons in Temporary Locations is an exceptional work of climate fiction.
Jacki Skole is a writer, communications professor, aspiring yogi and dog lover. Dogland: A Journey to the Heart of America’s Dog Problem is her first book.