Yes, you read right: Neal Shusterman’s new cli-fi novel for Young Adults (YA genre) is not your grandfather's sci-fi, and his longtime publisher Simon and Schuster Children’s Publishing company is letting the cat out of the bag in October 2018
“Dry” explores what would happen if the United States
ran out of water. Sound familiar? Droughts in
California, Colorado. Capetown in South Africa
running out of water now as we speak?
Cli-fi is in the air, and now it’s on the ground, too,
where future droughts will get worse and worse over time.
So Shusterman’s novel, which he co-wrote with his son Jarrod
for young readers as a both a wake up call
and warning, is a good example of YA cli-fi,
a new literary subgenre for young people.
The book, a dystopian climate change story
that also contains hope and the promise
of a better world, was co-written with his son Jarrod
and it follows Alyssa, a teenage girl living in
California during an extreme drought, which
everyone in the book calls “the flow crisis,”
and then “the Tap-Out.”
“That’s what the media’s been calling the drought,
ever since people got tired of hearing the word ‘drought,'”
Alyssa explains in the novel. “Kind of like the way
‘global warming’ became ‘climate change,’ and ‘war’
became ‘conflict.’ But now they’ve got a new catchphrase.
A new stage in our water woes.
They’re calling this the ‘Tap-Out.'”
The story continues is a tragic way: when Arizona and
Nevada pull out of a vital reservoir relief
deal that brings some of the country’s
scarce water supply to Southern California,
Alyssa and her community are left dry.
”Dry,” which is not a dry cli-fi book at all, and it will
leave your eyes feeling wet with tears, is in bookstores now.
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