McSweeney's Issue 58: 2040 A.D.(2019)

Carol EmshwillerAimee BenderMichael Chabon

Spanning six continents and nine countries—from metropolitan Mexico City to the crumbling ancient aqueducts of Turkey, the receding coastline of Singapore to the coral shores of northern Australia—McSweeney’s 58 is wholly focused on climate change, with speculative fiction from ten contributors, made in collaboration with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Global in scope, each story is set in the year 2040 and imagines what the world might look like if the dire warnings issued by the Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C were to come true. Using fiction—informed here and there by realism and climate science—this issue explores the tangible, day-to-day implications of these cataclysmic scientific projections. Featuring Tommy Orange, Elif Shafak, Luis Alberto Urrea, Asja Bakic, Rachel Heng, and others, with gorgeous full-color illustrations by Wesley Allsbrook.

From the issue’s introduction by Susan Casey-Lefkowitz, Chief Program Officer of the NRDC: “Each story in this special issue is the product of a unique collaboration between its author and an NRDC policy expert with specialized knowledge of how climate change is already affecting the world, and how it could continue to affect the world in the decades to come. The result, we hope, is a collection where fiction’s already considerable power is fortified by science.”

Featuring original stories by:
Tommy Orange
Claire G. Coleman
Birna Anna Björnsdóttir
Luis Alberto Urrea
Elif Shafak
Abbey Mei Otis
Asja Bakić
Rachel Heng
Kanishk Tharoor
Mikael Awake