About The Inheritors

The Inheritors is a novel about climate change, natural disasters, and human nature. Told through four alternating viewpoints, The Inheritors skewers anti-intellectual right-wing populism, destructive and counterproductive “climate justice” activism, social media culture, and the media’s two-facedness about “respect for expertise.”

The novel tracks scientific, political, and media events in a near future not too unlike our own world, narrating these events through the viewpoints of four members of the Kirby-Mellor family: a hurricane researcher; his twin sister, a nuclear physicist leading an experimental fusion lab; their older sister, a reformed and far-right ex-wild girl married to the press secretary for the Speaker of the House; and her daughter, a progressive climate justice activist in rebellion against her right-wing parents.

If you are expecting (or hoping for) a cli-fi novel in which the progressive activist movement is the “good guy,” you will not find that in The Inheritors. This is a brutal satire and that is not excepted. But the primary targets are right-wing populism and Internet-driven anti-intellectualism.

The Inheritors is scientifically accurate, because I, the writer, am an atmospheric scientist, and accuracy on matters of weather and climate is very important to me. Using a personal installation of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model on a Linux virtual machine, I have modeled the storm that features in this story to be certain that everything that occurs in respect to it is predicted by the physical equations governing the behavior of the atmosphere.

Is there an extreme, calamitous storm the likes of which you would expect to see in a Hollywood disaster flick? Yes.

Is it named and described correctly? Yes.

Is it something that the physical laws of the atmosphere predict? Yes.

As for the negative, cynical depiction of human nature that the novel will present…. How accurate that is depends on what we choose to do.