I think it was Mark Twain who once said, “There is no weather in this book.” Well, that might have worked for him, but weather is now climate and it’s in much of what I have written. I mentioned recently that two of my novels are very much a product of climate change. And this morning I heard on the news that some people on our North American continent have access to water only six hours a day. I don’t know whether to be proud or terrified that my futuristic story is to some extent no longer fiction.

In Accidental Child I imagined a future where the climate has become so hostile that a community creates a stringent social stratum that barely allows citizens to survive by rationing food, water, and children. There is an old adage that life is stranger than fiction, but I had not expected to see that what came to life in my imagination would become nonfiction.