Solitaire Townsend on Climate Fiction and Writing Godstorm
Solitaire Townsend on writing Godstorm, imagining an alternative Roman Empire, and telling climate stories through people, not preaching.
In GODSTORM, Solitaire Townsend imagines a world where the Roman Empire never fell, oil-powered technology reshaped history, and climate catastrophe is blamed on angry gods. In this guest post, she reflects on her shift from award-winning non-fiction to fiction, the years of research behind her alternative history, and why the most powerful climate stories don’t lecture readers but let them feel what’s at stake.
Guest post written by Solitaire Townsend, author of Godstorm.
For years, I attended a writing retreat where I was the only non-fiction author surrounded by aspiring novelists. Over dinner, I would confess how much I envied them. Fiction, I assumed, must be easier. Or at least more fun than years spent buried in non-fiction research, footnotes and peer review. Looking back, I can only laugh at my innocence.
After two award-winning non-fiction books, one of which even helped land me a TED talk, I decided to “treat myself” by writing fiction. I was immediately hooked. And just as immediately humbled. I discovered that I had been right about the joy of storytelling, and completely wrong about the rigour required to do it well. Art, it turns out, is not an escape from discipline.
Godstorm has taken more research than either of my professional books. Although admittedly, researching “how does being stabbed in the stomach feel?” and “do flamethrowers predate electricity?” has done terrible things to my search algorithms.
Part of the challenge is that Godstorm is an alternative history. It imagines a world where the ancient Romans, under Marcus Aurelius, invented the combustion engine. Their chariots became petroleum-powered charos, and an oil-fuelled Roman Empire never fell. With a degree in Classics and a career in climate action, I had a head start on the history and the science. But mapping thousands of years of altered geopolitics, technology and culture took years of work.
All this effort serves a climate fiction book where climate change is never mentioned once.
That choice was deliberate. I often think about Stephen Hawking’s comment that for every mathematical equation added to a book, he would lose half his readers. I feel the same about climate storytelling. You cannot write a compelling story about climate change itself. You can only write about people. The people affected by it. The people causing it. The people trying, sometimes with swords, to fix it.
My non-fiction book The Solutionists does this overtly, telling the stories of entrepreneurs, activists and leaders building solutions. Godstorm approaches the same truth sideways. The catastrophic “Godstorms” in the novel are blamed on a lack of piety, not on the oil burned for seventeen hundred years longer than in our world. Denial, after all, is timeless.
Perhaps parable is more powerful than preaching. In Godstorm, the world chokes on exhaust fumes, mourns lost forests, and fights over solutions dressed as mythology. Courage, honesty and tenacity are the only things that might save them. Much like us.
Sof course, story must always come first, with theme as a distant second. My protagonist, Arrow, is a gladiator turned governess. A trained killer in petticoats, attempting respectable parenting with mixed success. Once the child she loves is abducted, her fragile civility doesn’t last long. Then the swords come out.
Arrow is messy, violent, maternal and trying to be better than her past. Her struggle mirrors the wilding weather around her, and the journey many of us are on as we try to build a safer world for the children we love. That, to me, is the real joy of climate fiction. Not lecturing about the problem, but letting readers feel why the solution matters.
