Honeymoons in Temporary Locations is a collection of stories set on a “post-Impact” Earth where every human, from the poorest to the wealthiest, must live in a world shattered by climate change. Some stories are told in a traditional first- or third-person narrative, while others are in-universe ephemera: brochures, corporate memos, a podcast transcript. All the entries feed into each other, every piece planting seeds that germinate in future sections. But the book’s cohesiveness is also its biggest weakness: At a certain point the book stops feeling like it’s building upon itself and more like it’s plateaued, reiterating the same themes, concepts, and language.

The book is divided up into sections, with the first being “Oral History.” The first story is “Muri.” A sea captain and his crew are charged with rounding up the surviving polar bears and shipping them from their home in the Arctic down to Antarctica, in the hope that in this new environment this endangered species will thrive and avoid disappearing alongside the ice floes they call home. At first the story seems like a straightforward, classic near-future sci-fi fix-it tale: here’s a problem, and so us humans will use our superior brain power to step in and solve it. But that goes out the window when the polar bears mutiny and take control of the ship, revealing they aren’t just sentient but extremely intelligent. They can also talk.

The humans in “Muri” are trying to do what they think is the right thing: if left in the Arctic, the polar bears will starve. The bears know this too, but would still rather die in their natural habitat than on the literal other side of the world. Muri, the leader of the polar bears, also points out that introducing an invasive predator to a new ecosystem is just substituting one environmental disaster for another: “We will feast upon the penguins and seals unaccustomed to predators. And we’ll wipe them from the face of the continent. What then?” (p. 13) The story comments on human hubris, showing how even thinking we can correct our mistakes comes from a dangerous arrogance.

The next oral history is the titular one, “Honeymoons in Temporary Locations.” It features an NYC socialite who meets a woman at a party; the two get hitched PDQ. The newlyweds are soon forced to become climate refugees, however, when Manhattan is evacuated. An already fraught journey (and fraught fledgling relationship) is worsened when the two are separated. We never learn our narrator’s name, or the name of her wife—at times it seems like maybe even the main character has forgotten her wife’s name, as she admits that the two aren’t really that close. This story has one of the best character voices in the collection, reading like Dorothy Parker or Truman Capote reporting from the front lines of the climate crisis. But despite that uniqueness, the affected superficiality of the main character meant this story didn’t stick with me as much as others in the collection.

Following those two oral histories we get the next section, “Documents (Recovered).” The mediums here are delightfully varied: classified ads, a cruise ship leaflet, a podcast transcript. There’s an email newsletter, too, which offers its recipient, “Jeff,” the inside scoop on how to make savvy investments in the wake of catastrophic climate change. The documents take different approaches stylistically, but they all showcase humanity’s base desires: Even as they flee their homes, humans still look to hook up; even as the world burns, they still wish to make money; even as the planet dies, they still strive to check items off their personal bucket lists.

All this is good, pointed commentary, though how “on-message” each piece insisted on being rang a little falsely. Each medium uses the same terms to refer to what is happening. In some cases, this can be written off as ruthless corporate synergy: Of course the cruise ship brochure and investment newsletter use the same jargon, they might very well be owned by the same company. Likewise, the podcast hosts reading ads for those same products will also use the same language and phrasing, as dictated by their sponsors. But once we get into truly casual missives like the classified ads, or items aimed at a narrow, specific audience like birders, it feels like the wording should be more varied and casual. Remember the stretch of the pandemic where the coronavirus was just “the rona”? I wanted more of that.

The final section in the collection is “Participant Histories from Climafeel Clinical Trial.” This section is a return to a more traditional prose narrative, though these stories are in the third person unlike the first-person “oral” narratives of the first section. By centering individuals rather than broader ideas, and using less stylized prose than seen in the previous entries, these stories bring the climate apocalypse down to a human level. Several of the protagonists here are young children, a failing world foisted upon them through no fault of their own. Elizabeth (or “Bick”) can understand birds—their songs and chirps are words to her, but the only thing the birds ever ask her is “Why?” Similarly, after fifteen-year-old Deacon loses his mother, a forester with the Department of Natural Resources, he starts hearing trees speak. In another story, Santiago suffers from fugue episodes and is sent to a religious climate-change-denying conversion camp in an attempt to cure his condition. Each of these stories is affecting, the vulnerability of the characters bringing into sharp focus the vulnerability of the landscape around them—their suffering and the planet’s suffering is one and the same.

But the overarching section title tying them all together is weak: It’s implied that all of the main characters in this section will go on to take part in a trial for the drug Climafeel, yet that isn’t really an aspect in most of the stories.

The final story in the book is entitled ““Mark”” (the quotation marks are an important distinction). It’s a transcript of an ad for Climafeel. In it, “Mark” is your average American guy in his thirties with a wife and kids. He suffers from solastalgia, a mental health condition that almost every character in the book also suffers from (it’s such a constant thread that “Solastalgia” could have been an apt title for this book). Solastalgia shows up in different ways: some people claim they can suddenly hear animals speaking to them; other people develop a hatred for abstract art and can only safely look at landscapes. Mark, being a composite created for this ad, suffers from a mild combo of different symptoms:

MARK: It’s like disappearing from your life for a while. Scary. Then there are the depressions, which just feel impossible to get out of. And the fear, which keeps me housebound for weeks at a time. I started to develop sores on my skin with black threads that grew out of them, like my body was rotting from the inside out. Sometimes I went into fugue states. Other times I felt like I was hearing objects speaking to me or I had intense compulsions to self-harm. It’s embarrassing to admit this now, but there were even times that I thought I could hear animals and even plants speaking to me, trying to get inside my head. Weird stuff. (p. 142)

Climafeel, Mark says, has given him his life back.

The Climafeel ad is chilling in two respects: Trying to medicate away the grief of climate change ignores the actual issues people are facing, and the drug also lessens a person’s empathy and ability to appreciate art. But the other chilling aspect of the ad is how it mirrors a section from earlier in the book. In the “Documents (Recovered)” section, there is a “Climafeel In-House Marketing Brief.” The brief outlines the pros and cons of the drug, and how it needs to be marketed carefully: Specific wording needs to be used to obscure the fact that the drug effectively turns people into psychopaths. The “Mark” ad is point-for-point what is spelled out in the brief, the company’s insidious designs made manifest.

This works as a note to end the book on, reinforcing the corporate drivers of climate change (and the will to continue to profit from it). But I think that the collection would have had more impact if it had ended with “Muri.” It’s in “Muri” that we get a more accurate take on solastalgia: “What is considered madness by men is oftentimes nothing more than comprehension” (p. 32). While “Muri” is still set in the same world as the rest of the pieces, it feels apart from them, partly because, while the other stories are deeply interconnected, “Muri” takes place on a boat in one of the most isolated places on Earth. There’s less corporate lingo in the narrator’s vocab, giving his story a ring of authenticity; its message hits home harder for the relative rawness of the language.  But it also feels like “Muri” is the key to understanding all of the other stories in the book. When the captain asks why the polar bears allowed themselves to be rounded up, Muri tells him it was so there would be humans who would know the truth of the world and bear witness to it. It’s hard not to relate to the sea captain: what is a reader but a witness?

Honeymoons in Temporary Locations is an inventive, sometimes glib, sometimes bittersweet meditation on climate change. It can be as subtle as an anvil, but to quote an old internet staple, TV Tropes, “some anvils need to be dropped.” The book doesn’t offer any answers to anyone feeling despair over climate change, though it does affirm that such feelings are a normal response.

[Editor's Note: Publication of this poem was made possible by a gift from Marissa Lingen during our annual Kickstarter.]