On the political side of things, I have been donating copies of The Big Melt into legislator hands for their nightly bedtime reading. There are a group of very important bills on the state level that should be viewed and voted on through a climate lens. If you want copies to hand deliver to your representatives, let me know.

I also got a wonderful and very thoughtful review this week on Amazon. I thought I would share it with you.

Imagining the future so we can survive and improve it – by Connie L

We have reached a point in our history where there is no version of the future that does not include climate change.  This is a reality that we are accepting less gracefully and far less quickly than one might wish, but here it is.

One of the challenges of facing climate change has always been how big and abstract it is.  Scientific reports can only get us part of the way to crafting a human response to our changing world.  Ned Tillman’s The Big Melt is part of a growing body of speculative fiction that helps us more fully imagine living in a world of climate change.

James Holland Jones, an associate professor for Earth System Science and Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University, sees a critical role for storytelling in understanding the complexities of adapting to and mitigating climate change, and he says that books like The Big Melt can help us see “how people work, how they fight back, how they engage in [the] prosaic heroism of adapting to a changed world. This is powerful. It gives us hope for a better future.”

The Big Melt does all of this while sharing both the seriousness of the challenges we face and the hope of what people can accomplish when we work together towards a better future.  I love how capable and smart the book’s young protagonists are, and I recommend this book whole-heartedly.