How will technology — and society — adapt to the dramatic effects that climate change is expected to bring? Will necessity become the mother of invention in a world of rising seas? Will it be business as usual? Or will it be a little bit of both those scenarios?
A new sci-fi novel called “Salvagia” takes the third way: There are high-tech salvagers who make ends meet by dredging up artifacts from the flooded ruins of Miami. There are high-flying daredevils who race rockets through minefields of space junk. And there are also greedy folks who dream of using massive machines to build high-rises on South Florida’s new coast.
Guess which ones are the bad guys.
The book’s author, Tim Chawaga, says he wanted to blend the glittery tech of our modern world with the gritty drama of a Florida noir crime novel. “I wanted it to be like street-level conversations about how individual people can use technology in more powerful ways,” he says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast.
“It’s characters who are outsiders, outside of institutions, trying to build something else. … It’s not likely that they will achieve that in a meaningful and significant way. Maybe at best, incremental. And that feels very noirish to me,” he says.
“Salvagia” takes place in a near-term future when sea levels have risen about 15 feet above what they are today, due to the ice-thawing effects of global climate change. That’s on the high end of what climate models project for the year 2150 — but even at lower levels, Chawaga says the threats facing coastal regions are definitely not science fiction.
“Miami in particular is very, very vulnerable from a lot of different angles. It’s sinking a little bit. Sea levels are rising a little bit, or possibly a lot. The fresh water that Florida relies on is mostly in an aquifer that’s underground that, even at a certain level of sea level rise, will begin to be tainted. So all of those are very dangerous,” Chawaga says.
“At the same time, storms are getting stronger, and in ‘Salvagia’ in particular, the idea of supercanes — or super hurricanes — coming in as a regular occurrence is an accepted fact at this point,” he says.
This map from the NOAA Sea Level Rise Viewer uses modeling simulations to show the scale of potential coastal inundation, starting from today’s average height of the highest daily tide and going up to 6 feet of sea level rise. (NOAA / NRDC Illustration)
For the novel’s characters, it’s too late to head off the deluge. Instead, they’re learning to live with it. The main character, Triss Mackey, was inspired by Travis McGee, the hard-boiled salvage consultant and detective in John D. MacDonald’s Florida-based crime novels. But Triss relies on technologies that Travis could only dream of.
For example, Triss lives on a boat that has a mind (and a gender) of her own. The semi-sentient ship, christened the Floating Ghost, isn’t capable of discussing the ins and outs of climatology with Triss. But she has enough smarts to anticipate what her mistress wants her to do.
“I wanted to create a character that wouldn’t be intelligent, or that wasn’t necessarily an AI in the way that we are currently talking about it, but also had a sort of inherent freedom in the way that a dog does,” Chawaga says. “The way I think about the Floating Ghost is that she’s like a shelter dog whose history we don’t really know for most of the early part of her life, and Triss needs to figure that out.”
Triss and the other characters rely on wearable devices — including augmented-reality headsets, or “gogs” — to communicate with each other. That’s in line with how Chawaga expects wearable tech to evolve. “The thing that I think is coming next for phones is that they’re going on our faces, or they’re going in our heads,” he says.
“Salvagia” is Tim Chawaga’s debut novel. (Book cover by Steve Thomas / Diversion Books; author photo via TimChawaga.com)
“Salvagia” is no parlor drama: It revolves around the murder of a luxury hotel owner, whose chained-up corpse is discovered underwater by Triss during a salvaging dive. It’s not long before Triss encounters some shady characters who are out to make their fortune by redeveloping property that’s due to be abandoned by the government.
Chawaga says that plot thread was also inspired by MacDonald’s crime novels, which spanned the 1960s, ’70s and early ’80s. “Even back then, Travis McGee often laments at the number of developers who are building inexorably and constantly and higher, higher and higher in lower- and lower-lying places, and how they’re really just painting targets on their own backs,” Chawaga says.
Triss gets tangled up with the hotel owner’s son, one of the leading hotshots in a fictional rocket racing sport called atmo-breaking. The idea is to blast your rocket through an orbital debris field — and not get killed in the process.
“The people who are attracted to the sport are people who truly actually love it,” Chawaga says. “They’re like Formula 1 racers. They’re people who are addicted to extreme sports … but the sport itself is what’s being manipulated to become something that has no interest in being made safer at all, because there’s a financial investment to the sports book, to betting on essentially these ships to blow up. As long as that is still profitable, there isn’t going to be any incentive to make anything safer.”
Believe it or not, the Rocket Racing League was actually a thing two decades ago — but the real-life racers weren’t quite as adventurous as their fictional counterparts, and the racing venture eventually fizzled out due to financial difficulties.
To defend herself against the bad guys, Triss is equipped with hand-held weapons systems known as Knuckles, or echidnas. At the touch of a button, Knuckles can extend spring-loaded batons or deploy other nasty surprises to pummel an adversary. (The name of the weapons is also a double-barreled inside joke, playing off the name of a monster in Greek mythology as well as the name of a character in comic books, video games and movies starring Sonic the Hedgehog.)
Knuckles are like Swiss army knives, but deadlier. “I really wanted a weapon that was the most individualized that it could possibly be — that philosophically was meant for the person who wields it, to make it exactly what they wanted to make out of it,” Chawaga said.
In “Salvagia,” Chawaga highlights the twin threats facing 21st-century societies, due to climate change and due to the potential misuse of technology. The way Chawaga sees it, there’s one potential solution that addresses both those threats — and other societal ills as well.
“The solution to me, I think, is to engage with your community, to focus on the strengths of small groups and individuals, to think of the ways in which one can empower oneself with technology, for sure, but also with community, with society. The things that get eroded when technology gets too big, and by climate change, are our communities,” he said. “If we can think of ways to keep groups together, to enhance the strength of small groups … that’s where the solution will be.”
Cosmic Log Used Book Club
Chawaga has written several short stories and a couple of plays, but “Salvagia” is his only novel. It won’t be the only one for long. He’s already working on a sequel to “Salvagia.”
We started discussing reading recommendations during the show, and after our chat, Chawaga followed up with an email listing four sci-fi works worth adding to your reading list or watchlist. Disclosure: I’ve begun including links to books through the Amazon Associate program. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases:
1. ‘The Eternaut’ on Netflix: “It’s an end-of-the-world show, and every end-of-the-world show is really about the society that’s ending. ‘Eternaut’ is an incredible example of one of the really great aspects of streaming, which is that we have a lot of amazing prestige international television now available to us. ‘Eternaut’ is Argentine, set in Buenos Aires, and it feels really of its place.
“Where a similar American end-of-the-world show is usually immediately about fighting the zombies, or the aliens, or the killer fungus, ‘Eternaut’ is much more focused on the breakdown of society at a street-by-street, neighbor-to-neighbor level, an echo of the desaparecidos period of Argentine history.
“So, I recommend it, particularly, because of its street-level focus, of the ways in which communities and small groups can be instantly dissolved or eroded by an invading force, to the point where it does a lot of the work for them. If, as I said, solutions to our crises can only come from strengthening individuals and small groups, then the opposite is true as well: If you want to destroy us, destroy our communities.”
2. Becky Chambers’ Monk & Robot series: “I always forget to mention this series in relation to ‘Salvagia’ because it’s very far future, but these books are also a huge influence on my thinking for ‘Salvagia’! If I were to create an optimistic timeline for this planet, I would put these books at the end of recorded history, and ‘Salvagia’ at like the 2% mark. It’s the guiding light for how I’d like societies to be, their relationship to technology, the planet and each other, while ‘Salvagia’ is more about the teeny little baby steps (and setbacks) it might take to achieve some small part of it. Chambers is a master of speculative social design.” (Paid link.)
3. Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries: “I think there should be more serialized science fiction, but probably really I just think there should be more Murderbot Diaries. I would read as many of them as she’d care to write. Like ‘Salvagia,’ they’re first person, which is very difficult to pull off in science fiction. (I know from experience!) The Apple TV+ show is a fantastic adaptation.” (Paid link.)
4. ‘Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole,’ by Isabel J. Kim: “This is a fantastic train-of-thought response to ‘The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.’ It’s a blast, it’s winning all the awards, go read it if you haven’t.”
Those are all worthy recommendations for the Cosmic Log Used Book Club, which highlights books and other works with cosmic themes that have been around long enough to show up at your local library or secondhand book shop. We’re highlighting “The Eternaut” as this month’s selection, not only because of the Netflix show but also because of the Fantagraphics graphic novel that first came out in English a decade ago and is now being reprinted.
Tim Chawaga will be the guest of honor at a launch party for “Salvagia” at 4 p.m. PT Aug. 14 at Hugo House in Seattle. The program will feature a conversation with science-fiction writer Isabel J. Kim. Chawaga will also do a “Salvagia” reading at noon PT Aug. 15 as part of Seattle Worldcon 2025, held at the Seattle Convention Center’s Summit building, and he’ll participate in other Worldcon panels. Check the Worldcon website for full information about the schedule of events, membership rates and other details.
You can purchase “Salvagia” using this Amazon Associates link, which is associated with the Cosmic Log Used Book Shop (a.k.a. CLUB Shop). As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.
My co-host for the Fiction Science podcast is Dominica Phetteplace, an award-winning writer who is a graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop and lives in San Francisco. She’ll talk about the outer solar system with astronomer Pedro Bernardinelli of the University of Washington’s DiRAC Institute at a Worldcon event scheduled at 7:30 p.m. PT Aug. 16 at Seattle Convention Center / Summit. To learn more about Phetteplace, visit DominicaPhetteplace.com.
Thirsting for more? Check out these earlier Fiction Science podcasts from the intersection of climate fiction and climate science:
- Annalee Newitz on the future of terraforming
- Neal Stephenson on the climate crisis and the multiverse
- Michael E. Mann on billionaires and the new climate war
- Kim Stanley Robinson on how to give the climate story a happy ending
Fiction Science is included in FeedSpot’s 100 Best Sci-Fi Podcasts. Use the form at the bottom of this post to subscribe to Cosmic Log, and stay tuned for future episodes of the Fiction Science podcast via Apple, Spotify, Player.fm, Pocket Casts and Podchaser. If you like Fiction Science, please rate the podcast and subscribe to get alerts for future episodes.
