Honeymoons in Temporary Locations

"In Ashley Shelby’s brilliant, daring, and innovative collection Honeymoons in Temporary Locations, the reader is plunged into a world of climate change and feelings of loss that come with it. In Shelby’s imagination, trees walk, birds and polar bears talk, and all of them look to humans to answer the question, ‘Why?’ With stories told in a variety of forms from traditional pieces of short fiction to future restaurant menus to online advertisements, Shelby digs deep into the grief of a changing world and all who are affected by it." —Alex DiFrancesco, author of All City

"Honeymoons in Temporary Locations is a deeply felt, deeply imagined collection of dispatches from the weirdest extrapolatory fringes of the world we’ve made, the world we’ve allowed to happen. Ashley Shelby has kaleidoscopic vision—from climate disaster tourism brochures to refugee camps for the rich to talking bears, she has created a vivid, terrifying, and unexpected landscape. There is a profound grief that runs through these stories, grief over what is becoming of our natural world as a result of our very unnatural way of living, but also a sense of connection." —Omar El Akkad, author of What Strange Paradise

Eclectic, experimental, and wildly imaginative climate fictions from a familiar world hauntingly transformed

Climate disaster–induced fugue states, mutinous polar bears, support groups for recently displaced millionaires, men who hear trees, and women who lose their wives on environmental refugee resettlement trips. In these dispatches from a weirding world, the absurd and fantastic are increasingly indistinguishable from reality. Exploring this liminal moment, Ashley Shelby’s collection of climate fictions imagines a near future that is both unnervingly familiar and subversively strange.

Set in the same post-climate-impact era, these stories range from playfully satirical to poignantly humane, bending traditional narrative forms and coming together into a brilliant and unusual contemplation of our changing world. Featuring the Hugo-nominated novelette “Muri,” Honeymoons in Temporary Locations processes the unthinkable through riotous inventions like guided tours of submerged cities, Craigslist ads placed by climate refugees, and cynical pharmaceutical efforts to market a drug to treat solastalgia, the existential distress caused by environmental change.

Shelby reengineers the dystopic bleakness that characterizes so much climate fiction by embracing an eclectic experimentalism leavened with humor, irony, and the inevitable bathos that characterizes the human experience. Unexpected and clever, this innovative collection confirms her status as a visionary writer whose work expands the forms, attitudes, and possibilities of climate fiction.

Ashley Shelby is a novelist, short story writer, and former environmental journalist. Her debut novel, South Pole Station, was a New York Times Editor’s Pick, a Shelf Awareness Book of the Year, and winner of the Lascaux Prize in Fiction. She is also author of the nonfiction book Red River Rising: The Anatomy of a Flood and the Survival of an American City. She lives in the Twin Cities.