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You're listening to Climate Decoded, the podcast that deciphers climate change communication. We untangle how different narratives illuminate or obscure pathways to climate justice. We talk about how we talk about climate change. 

And Welcome to Climate Chats, a series in which we have casual conversations with the top climate experts, authors, and activists from around the world. 

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Today I’m chatting with writer Susanna Kwan, whose debut novel “Awake in the Floating City” is out tomorrow. I’ve preordered it and am looking forward to it arriving and cracking it open this week. “Awake in the Floating City” is about the unexpected relationship between an artist and the 130-year-old woman she cares for—two of the last people living in a flooded San Francisco of the future, the home neither is ready to leave.

I met with Susanna in her apartment in San Francisco, in the Richmond district. After chatting, we took a walk to Lands End, an area of the city that inspired some of her writing. A big thank you to Susanna for opening her home and her afternoon to me, and I encourage you all to buy “Awake in the Floating City,” out May 13.

Without further ado, Susanna Kwan. 

Susanna Kwan: So the book is, it's set in this future version of San Francisco. And it follows an artist, Bo. She's 40 years old. She is grieving the loss of her mother who disappeared in a big storm, and she hasn't been able to do any of her art in a long time. Most of the people she knows left the city a long time ago. So she's living a pretty isolated existence. And her cousin lives in Canada. He's trying to get her to join him in this, you know, like safer place, and she plans to go, but then she receives this note under her door from this 130 year old Chinese woman who lives in her building.

Kim: 130?!

Susanna: She's really old, and is needing some more help around the house, and she's losing her mobility, and she knows that Bo is around. And Bo is sort of looking for an excuse to Stay. She doesn't know why she doesn't want to go join her cousin and her uncle, but she feels really strong ties to her home, and this gives her a reason to to stay. And you know, see what comes next. So they end up spending a year together. While Mia, the older woman's health is declining, they get to know each other. Mia has this super interesting life history, and she starts sharing stories about that. And then slowly, Bo starts, you know, kind of reconnecting with her creative practice, and she realizes, oh my god, there's all of these memories connected to our lives, to the city history, and it's all going to disappear. And so she decides that she's going to make a project that honors those memories and and Mia's life, and also these rich histories that she uncovers during her research process.

Kim: I think it's, I mean, forgive the question. It is a bit simplistic to be like, Are you a climate fiction author, or what genre do you specifically fit in? Because I I totally think that climate transcends all of life, and I almost think the more effective works have climate just kind of in the background or omnipresent, or it's imbued and everything that's happening with the characters. I think that's a reflection of reality. It's just always there somehow. 

Susanna: I did not intend to write a work of climate fiction, but I also think this book absolutely fits that description. I don't tend to think of my own work in like specific categories or genres. But climate change is present in this novel because it's present in the world. It's not a plot device. It's more of like a reflection of like an extreme version of lived reality. So I think the setting the book is set in a future version of San Francisco. It's been raining for seven years non stop, so it's the city's flooded, and that's not our present reality, but it is, I mean, it's not even maybe a plausible reality, but we're living in these increasingly unstable conditions, and so this is sort of a i. Uh, an imagined extension of the present. During the first year I was writing this book, I read Amitav Ghosh is the great arrangement. Yes, yeah, it's this essay, this long essay about how it's about the absence of of climate in contemporary literature, and how future generations are going to look at us and the work that we've created and see how deranged we were for ignoring this climate crisis.

Susanna: You know, one moment I remembered was in the late 1990s I was a teenager here, and during the king tides, I remember the bay rose and like spilled onto the Embarcadero, and I couldn't believe it. It was like that the bay level could actually. Actually get that high and spill onto the streets of downtown. And it was the first time I thought, Oh, how is the city designed? What are we planning for? What haven't we planned for? Water is very powerful in large volumes. And then much later, I was living in Nashville during the 2010 floods, and it was my first experience living through an extreme weather event and understanding in a visceral way. You know, I seen coverage of floods happening elsewhere in the world, but I understood on some level, what it was like to live in the place that was being inundated with that kind of water. And it was terrifying to like, look out the window and see, instead of a street with cars on it, there was like a river rushing by, or to go downtown, and it was underwater to try to get home with my roommate after picking up emergency supplies, and all the intersections had turned into lakes. I remember like going into houses that were destroyed by water and then later mold, and just like seeing entire neighborhoods that were gone, but there were also these epic volunteer drives. There was this, I think, for a month, everybody had to be really careful with with drinking water, because the water treatment plant had been flooded. And you know, our water sources were contaminated. And you know, I personally came out of that experience fine, but it instilled in me this understanding of fear, but also compassion for what was lost, and this sense of collective responsibility for each other. There was this one moment where, like in the middle of the worst of the storm, somebody knocked at my door, and I opened it, and there was this cab driver, and he was he looked so desperate, and he needed some fresh water. I don't even remember why I and I've thought about that moment a lot, and it's essentially how my novel begins, as this character receives this message from a neighbor asking for help in an emergency, and you know, like the answer is yes, and there's just so many moments with disaster and care, especially around flooding where I've just been moved. So I think that's probably all informed the world that that I made for this book, definitely.

Kim: I wonder if you've thought about reflections of personal grief with climate grief, and any parallels that can be drawn there, or lessons from personal experience versus a broader global experience.

Susanna: I think climate change is sort of impossible to wrap your head around. It's like too big to look at or understand

Kim: Totally.

Susanna: And yet, everything on the planet is impacted by it, some places, much more so than others. So in telling a story, um. The stories we tell should reflect that reality, but it has to be like at a scale that is comprehensible. So, you know, like with this novel, the focus is super narrow. It's these two characters. They barely leave their apartments, and they live in the same building, but over the course of the year, and this exchange of stories, they are going, you know, much deeper into history. It's set in the future, and so the book holds a lot more time and space than it appears to and I think all of this is happening at the intersection of personal experience and collective experience. You know, like Bo is emerging from this period of isolation, and she's re-engaging with the larger world. She has all these memories of San Francisco, but those are now becoming intertwined with the stories that she hears from Mia and the historical details she's digging up in what's left of the city's archives. Bo is also, you know, starting to create art again, and she's doing it to honor Mia, but also their shared home. So it's always kind of this, like intimate scale and this larger scale combining. You know, she's caring for Mia as Mia dies, but she's also tending to the dying world around them.

Susanna: When we, you know, when we lose our homes to wildfire or floods or hurricanes, like it's, it's our personal memories that we're losing, but it's also this collective history that we're losing. It's disappearing at the same time, and those entities are always connected.

Kim: I'm super curious about art and writing, and from the little bit of Instagram that I looked it looks like you do some art as well, and your character does art. And I've been reflecting a lot through working on this episode about the specific value that writing has as a medium to convey messages and communicate about climate. And the two things that have come up are interiority and time, and that writing is the only medium, apart from, you know, a movie or visual arts or performative arts, that you can really play within one sentence, get into someone's head and go back and forth in time and present. So I wanted to ask you about writing as a medium, and maybe in relation to visual art as a medium, what those different creative spaces can convey.

Susanna: Yeah, absolutely, both of those things are exactly why I think fiction is, is what makes fiction a unique method of communication. You can build portals to another world. You can manipulate time like it's a novel is essentially like a time travel machine.

Kim: Right.

Susanna: And you were saying yeah, in one sentence, you can say in the year 2052, San Francisco is underwater, and then immediately that becomes a world inside of a reader's head that they're building along with along with you.

Kim: Yeah.

Susanna: And then yes, you can express private and shared experiences of a place, and you can bring into relationship people and timelines that would never intersect. So for example, the two characters, Bo and Mia, belong to generations that will never meet in our world because of like, the limitations of the human lifespan. But in the novel, I'm able to bring them into a direct relationship, and they are having conversations and discovering the way that they and the context that made them are deeply connected. And yeah, in one book, in one story, I can dig into, like Chinese immigration in San Francisco during the early 1900s. And I can explore the colors of the landscape of this region. And I can, like, take liberties with a family story and write it in a scene in the book. And I can invent this rooftop society in a floating museum. And show how all of those things are totally interconnected. I think that's the magic of fiction. I've done some visual art. I think most of the drawing I've done in recent years is totally unrelated to the book. So visitors to my website might get a little confused, but, you know, and I've also done some music, and it's with fiction that I've been able to explore the complexities of relationships between people and place and those layered histories that they carry. Yeah, there's this range of time and fiction that isn't accessible in other forms.

Kim: Yeah.

Susanna: But it's not that fiction is like the most effective, right? It's like the least efficient. It took me seven years to say what I was trying to say. But yeah, it's not a form that I don't think it's a form that's meant to educate or mobilize a reader. It's doing something quieter. It's like illuminating how we live. And yeah, I think that's a lot of that is about interiority and this private internal experience that - . It's a type of knowledge that is about the intimate relationships, they're at the center of all of our lives. But it's not the kind of thing that we find if we go read a news article or look into official records or, like, read a textbook, and yet it's like it's super essential to how we live. So yeah, I think fiction is a great place to explore that. 

Kim: This is a communication podcast, and I think a lot about different models of communication. And an older model is kind of like you have the communicator with a message that they deliver through a specific medium to an audience who receives that message, but more nuanced, newer forms of communication, models of communication, talk about ecosystems around both communicator and receiver, and also that it's a two way exchange and back and forth and all around. So I wanted to ask you how you see this novel and yourself as a communicator existing in these various communication ecosystems.

Susanna: I remember hearing the phrase somewhere that every job is a climate job, and that has helped remind me that everybody does have a role in creating the future, and that having a diversity of skills and perspectives is essential in climate work, which reaches every corner of the world. I see this book as one of those climate jobs now. You know, when I started following climate news more carefully, I was learning about conservation and policy and sustainable energy and climate patterns, and that knowledge started getting woven into the writing. So the book carries some of that. One person told me she had been active in the sunrise movement, but it was this book, more than her activism, that made her feel the urgency of the crisis and say to herself, you know, we generationally, are not doing enough right now, and that meant so much to me, because I don't consider myself an activist in a traditional sense. I have a lot of respect for people who are doing grassroots organizing, but maybe with a novel, I can invite a reader into a different kind of relationship, where you know they're they're having that internal shift and how they think and how they feel about the world and about climate through the Power of Story. Yeah, there's just, there's just, there's so many ways to engage with other people and other beings on these issues, depending on what your strengths and resources are. So whether that's like sustainable energy or infrastructure or film and TV or philanthropy or conservation or like newsletters, or having a big moment, like those are just all that's all work that I am, that I feel like I'm in conversation with, and I don't know, I don't know what life the book will have in The world, but it's one that's going to, you know, like the reader is making the book, along with me, and all of their experiences and their knowledge is, I'm hoping going to overlap with that. That's, that's the hope. I think the book itself is, I think the engine of it is really this desire for connection and an acknowledgement of our interconnectedness, as well as a vehicle for it. So, yeah, I just think in the design of it, I'm all of those questions were present in. And that's what I'm hoping for, the life it has beyond me.

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And that’s our episode for this week. Thank you so much again to Susanna for opening her home to me. Susanna Kwan’s debut novel “Awake in the Floating City” is out tomorrow, May 13, 2025, wherever books are sold. Catch you next week, and as always, keep up the creative and constructive climate thought, conversation, and action. 

You’ve been listening to Climate Decoded. Climated Decoded is produced by Chantal Cough-Schulze, Lara Heledd Davies-Jones, Isabel Baudish, Greg Davies-Jones, Jens Wendel-Hansen, Jamie Stark, Alex Teske, and me, Kim Kenny.

To read the transcript and see the resources we mentioned in the episode, check out the link in the show notes. To keep up with the podcast, follow us on all the socials – we’re at climate_decoded on Instagram, and Climate Decoded Podcast on LinkedIn.

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