Climate Change

As might be expected in a novel devoted to an accounting of a fictionalized environmental cataclysm, The Light Pirate is deeply concerned with climate change and its consequences. Brooks-Dalton devotes a fair amount of the novel to a sensory and immersive description of the kinds of broad societal changes likely to befall humanity as the climate crisis worsens, lending particular attention to the rapid disappearance of livable land along the Gulf Coast of the United States and portraying nature as a potent destructive force. However, in other respects, the novel takes a revisionist view of the threat posed by climate change, celebrating individual people while refusing to mourn the loss of civilization, even implying a beautiful and symbiotic relationship between humanity and nature.

The first two sections of the novel are devoted largely to the rapid deterioration of American society (and Florida culture in particular...