Yet Still the Earth Burns

M. Keith Booker reviews Gabrielle Korn’s new novel “The Shutouts.”

By M. Keith BookerDecember 3, 2024

• SF

• Environment

IN HER DEBUT NOVEL Yours for the Taking (2023), Gabrielle Korn imagines a world of the 2050s in which irreversible climate change has made most of the earth virtually uninhabitable by human beings. In response, the world has mobilized under the leadership of a United World Government to build climate-controlled domed enclaves called “Insides” on the sites of a number of former cities around the globe. At first, these Insides seem devoted to what might be interpreted as utopian policies of social engineering, though we learn over the course of the narrative that they harbor dark secrets—including the obvious fact that only a small percentage of the world’s population can be accommodated in these Insides, thus predictably leading to elitist policies in terms of who can or cannot get in.

But it gets even worse. For one thing, gigantic, energy-guzzling space shuttles have also been constructed in order to create extraterrestrial living environments for the super-wealthy, who secretly siphon off a large portion of the agricultural production of the Insides to feed themselves. Moreover, New York’s Inside is overseen by one Jacqueline Millender, who has inherited her wealth and power through her family’s ownership stake in JM Inc., a large, sinister oil conglomerate. Putting an oil heiress in charge of a project designed to battle the effects of climate change seems like a bad idea indeed, but the idea turns out to be even worse than one might suspect. Millender herself lives on one of the shuttles, all the while concocting a Bond-villain plot ultimately intended to make her Inside into an all-female environment, along with her apparent eventual goal of wiping out all the other Insides—and thus all other human males.

By the end of the novel, Millender’s plot has been defeated, but catastrophic and irreversible climate change remains an existential threat to the human race. Korn then picks up this narrative in The Shutouts, a new novel that essentially functions as both a sequel and a prequel to Yours for the Taking, focusing on characters who have been shut out from the Inside facilities and left to fend for themselves.

The Shutouts features two main narrative threads. The first, set in 2041, is related through letters written by a woman named Kelly to Orchid, the daughter she left behind and to whom she is attempting to return after a sojourn working as a hacker with a group of radical climate activists known as the “Winter Liberation Army” (WLA). This narrative is set during a period when the American social structure is just beginning to fall apart and when the Inside Project is still in the planning stages. It is clear, though, that a major climate disaster is on the horizon. In a final letter addressed to her estranged husband, Kelly spells out her view of the coming crisis:

A lot of people are going to die. Power grids are going to be shut off, the old modes of transportation—cars, trains, planes, even boats—will have nothing to run on. The agricultural industries will fall apart. The government will limit its support to a certain class of people. A class that you and I are not part of.

This suggestion that the government works only for the elites is a crucial aspect of the politics of The Shutouts, contributing to a problematic view of government in general as a sinister force. Meanwhile, the novel’s second narrative is a direct sequel to Yours for the Taking. Set in 2078, this story takes place in the wake of the demise of the Inside Project at the end of Korn’s first book. Two key characters from that first novel—a woman named Ava and her adult daughter Brook—flee the New York Inside and attempt to make their way north to Canada. On the way, they meet Orchid, who turns out to be Ava’s former lover. They all then decide to head north, together with a nonbinary escapee from the WLA, Max. Eventually, these characters locate the survivalist group earlier founded by Orchid, which has now established a presumably utopian community near the shores of a crater lake in Northern Canada, one of the few areas on earth where temperatures are still low enough to sustain quasi-permanent settlements. The novel then ends on a hopeful note, as this community begins to have success growing a new “super bean” that Max has brought with them from the WLA, ensuring a viable and sustainable food supply.

The Shutouts, like its predecessor, is written in a plain, unadorned style that is clearly reminiscent of young adult fiction, and its basic scenario (which significantly simplifies the issue of climate change) has something of a YA feel as well. Much of the action involves characters who would be very much at home in that genre—teenagers or new adults dealing with the usual travails of the transition from adolescence, though with the added difficulty, in this case, that they are coming of age amid the climate death of human civilization. This context gives the novel a special urgency, and one could even argue that a bit of oversimplification for explanatory purposes can be forgiven in a work that deals with such urgent issues. And if the characterization is a bit shallow, the main figures are at least likable and easy to understand. The narratives move along at a good pace as well, and the overall story is significantly more compelling than that of Yours for the Taking, making for a quick and enjoyable read.

All in all, The Shutouts does a fairly good job of making the point that climate change is indeed a serious threat, though it probably exaggerates the magnitude of phenomena such as global warming and rising sea levels in the interest of conveying this threat’s seriousness. The novel also fails to display the kind of genuinely detailed technical understanding of the possible remedies that we see in the best climate-centered science fiction, such as the work of Kim Stanley Robinson. The Shutouts isn’t that sort of hard SF, of course, so this lack of detail does not particularly undermine its climate warnings, which involve more of an attempt to raise an alarm and draw attention to climate issues than to propose specific policies.

Korn also does a laudable job in her coverage of other issues, virtually ticking off one by one a list of positions that might be regarded as progressive, especially relating to gender. For example, many of the characters are gay, trans, or nonbinary, and their nonheteronormative status is generally presented as simply one characteristic among many. The novel does acknowledge the existence of anti-trans political forces in this future world, but those forces are clearly meant to be regarded as hidebound and wrongheaded deplorables. The novel suggests (perhaps somewhat optimistically) that women’s rights and political power have recently gained significant ground (as of 2041), but it also envisions a men’s rights movement that seems affronted by these gains out of a sense that any drive for equal rights for women must somehow be an attack on the rights of men.

It is clear where Korn stands on such matters, though clarity is sometimes again achieved through oversimplification. Indeed, a tendency toward simplifying issues into a contrast of good versus evil is a clear problem with both Yours for the Taking and The Shutouts, even though Korn takes specific steps in both to try to overcome the problem. For example, in Yours for the Taking, the somewhat cartoonish villain Millender displays an old-fashioned and simplistic feminism driven by an essentialist binary notion of gender that can be summarized as women good, men bad. And Korn leaves no doubt that Millender’s simplistic view is harmful. The Shutouts, though, sometimes seems to be headed in a similar direction when it suggests that the WLA, despite their admirable dedication to protecting the natural environment, is seriously hampered by the patriarchal attitudes of its all-male leadership, which ultimately trump (so to speak) everything else. Thus, one of the WLA’s leaders, a man named Len, seems to be thoroughly dedicated to protecting the environment but nonetheless remains a rapey, abusive, slobbering Neanderthal in his attitudes toward women (he turns out to be a pedophile as well).

In this exploration of the patriarchal bias of the WLA, the novel’s concerns with the environment and gender converge. Meanwhile, this conflicting characterization of Len might seem a step toward complexity, though it also suggests that patriarchal attitudes are so strong that they tend to override other concerns. Mostly, though, this characterization serves as a counter to the ecofeminist argument that patriarchy and abuse of the environment are ideologically aligned. Len himself explicitly argues against ecofeminism, claiming that women have now achieved equality, yet “still the earth burns,” apparently not self-aware enough to realize that his own patriarchal views demonstrate that women have not achieved equality in this future world. Meanwhile, trans man Vero, founder of the WLA (and Kelly’s lover), seems more sympathetic to ecofeminist arguments but displays his own (less extreme) patriarchal attitudes that ultimately contribute to Len’s ability to seize control of the group after Vero’s death.

If Len thus functions as another cartoonishly evil antagonist (like Jacqueline Millender), The Shutouts also features an even more sinister (and problematic) villain in the form of a shadowy entity simply identified as “the government.” This entity seems to pursue the exact same conspiratorial policies even after nation-states are succeeded by a single world system, as if big government is a bad thing by definition and will always do similar things. The Shutouts, meanwhile, stipulates that the climate crisis quickly leads to the rise of this world government, in what is presented—without further explanation—as a simple and straightforward process, despite the massive resistance any such move would obviously meet in reality. Again, glossing over the difficulty of this transition is probably not a big deal, but the lack of change in policies following this radical transformation tends to suggest that any large-scale government is inherently evil, devoted to the needs of a rich elite and unconcerned with the suffering of most of the population. Indeed, The Shutouts even goes so far as to stipulate that the government actually wants catastrophic climate change to happen in order to reduce the world population to a more controllable level—an echo of the worst of the conspiracy theories that have become rampant in recent years.

This simplistic notion that population reduction would lead to more efficient management of the world seems to ignore the catastrophic effect that such a reduction might have on the global economy. After all, the rich elite can maintain their status only if they have masses of workers to produce their wealth for them. This conspiratorial view of government is thus closely aligned with another glaring weakness of The Shutouts—its tin ear regarding economics. For example, the economic workings of the Inside Project in Yours for the Taking make no sense at all, but the novel does nothing to point out this fact or to attribute it to irresponsible policies on the part of the powers that be. In The Shutouts, meanwhile, the WLA (a motley crew of climate activists living out in the woods) somehow manages to marshal enough resources to bring the world’s top environmental scientists to their compound, where they continue their research on high-tech procedures for fighting climate change. As Vero explains: “We’re safe here, especially if we implement our new technologies. We could be okay, when everywhere else isn’t. As long as we remain under the radar.” This notion, of course, is just plain silly. Climate change must be dealt with on a global scale, not in isolated enclaves, but the novel does nothing to suggest that Vero is being naive. Moreover, the novel even specifies that the group is having a great deal of success with its research program and is likely to be able to implement bold new technologies, which shows a complete lack of understanding of the resources and funds necessary to carry out advanced research and develop workable technologies.

Of course, such research and development can only be successfully carried out by big government, so the novel’s idealized view of DIY research programs is a function of its anti-government stance. This stance, meanwhile, can be seen as part of a suspicion of utopianism that runs through both of Korn’s novels, moving into the realm of the outright anti-utopian. Utopias driven by ideology, Korn seems to imply, are almost certain to go bad because they encourage the development of a management structure that smacks of “government,” whether those “utopias” be the corporate-sponsored enclaves of the Insides or the oppositional utopia of the WLA. In fact, despite occasional nods toward the value of collective action, the politics of both novels (especially The Shutouts) sometimes verge on a sort of eco-libertarianism, in which genuinely effective action can only be undertaken by dedicated individuals or small groups of individuals.

Unfortunately, climate change is a large-scale problem that requires large-scale solutions, and Korn’s apparent preference for small, localized activities undertaken by isolated groups in remote rural communities does not provide such solutions. Granted, it is not Korn’s job as a novelist to provide them, and The Shutouts does have the potential to offer readers a certain amount of both entertainment and enlightenment. Still, by suggesting solutions to the climate crisis that are not only unhelpful but also possibly harmful, Korn’s novels fail to earn a place among the outstanding contemporary climate fiction that has been produced by writers as diverse as Robinson, Barbara Kingsolver, Paolo Bacigalupi, Jeff VanderMeer, Neal Stephenson, Annie Proulx, and others. Still, novels such as The Shutouts have more potential to reach a younger audience than the works of those other writers, which makes its devotion to pointing out the urgency of the climate crisis all the more valuable, even as it makes Korn’s ignorance of economics and her radical anti-government stance all the more troubling.