Scary Things

Well, my first SF novel, The Drylands, is going to be out in print again, from Fairwood Press, in January 2007. This is rather cool, since I did extensive reseach on global warming back in the early nineties when I wrote it. I mean EXTENSIVE research. And it just wasn't a hot issue back then.

So I'm going through the book, tweaking it a bit, and updating things. And I am scaring the daylights out of myself, folks. Back then, the top climate scientists were using computer models to predict the changes in ecosystems and oceans as the planet warmed. While I was hoping for a plausible leap from their proposals to my rather extreme (I thought) future, I found that my extreme future fell within their predictions. Oooh, not good.

So, I knew that. Why am I scaring myself? Because, folks, the things that those models predicted as happening say 40 or 50 years out are happening now. Twelve years later. This is giving me the willies. It's bad enough to think through a grim future but even worse to look up and realize it's actually coming down the track at you. Heads up, folks. Where we're going is ugly.

So back to editing. It's scary. I think that my kids might see this world come to pass.