Emergency Weather

by Tim Jones

"Everything felt wrong, everywhere. The floor was at a weird angle – he took one step and staggered sideways against the wall. Was that shudder the house moving again?"

Zeke has to stay with his aunt and uncle in Lower Hutt after a landslide takes his East Coast home off its foundations. Allie puts her drought-ridden Otago dairy farm out of her mind and catches a plane to the capital city. Stephanie wonders why she’s sitting around a table at the Ministry for Resilience – again.

In 'Emergency Weather', three people find themselves in Wellington as the climate crisis crashes into their lives. A giant storm is on its way – what will be left of the city when it’s over?

A scarily prescient thriller by award-winning author and climate change activist Tim Jones.

Genres: Fiction

256 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2023

About the author

I'm an author from New Zealand who writes climate fiction, science fiction, literary fiction, and poetry. I won the New Zealand Society of Authors Peter & Dianne Beatson Fellowship in 2022.

Here's how you can buy my books, and some recent anthologies with my work in them:

Books

Emergency Weather is my new climate fiction (cli-fi) novel from The Cuba Press, published in October 2023. Three people find themselves in Wellington, New Zealand as the climate crisis crashes into their lives. A giant storm is on its way – what will be left of the city when it’s over?

Where We Land is my climate fiction (cli-fi) novella from The Cuba Press, published in 2019. An earlier version of this novella, Landfall, is available from Amazon.com as a Kindle ebook.

My latest full-length poetry collection is New Sea Land: poems about climate change, sea level rise, and the way the sea and the land interact with each and with us.

My latest anthology is 2014 poetry anthology The Stars Like Sand: Australian Speculative Poetry, co-edited with P.S. Cottier. You can buy The Stars Like Sand from the publisher and from Amazon.com. You can also get special offers and more information on the Stars Like Sand Facebook page.

Ever wondered what makes men tick? Then buy my latest poetry collection Men Briefly Explained from Amazon.com in Kindle or paperback format.

My short story collection Transported, which was longlisted for the 2008 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, is now available for the Kindle.

Voyagers: Science Fiction Poetry from New Zealand, an anthology I co-edited with Mark Pirie, won the 2010 Sir Julius Vogel Award for Best Collected Work. You can buy Voyagers from Amazon.com as a paperback or Kindle e-book, or buy it directly from the publisher at the Voyagers mini-site.

You can find details of all these books at my Amazon.com author page.

Reviews

[Steven Price · Rating 5 out of 5]

I admired this book very much. In particular, the descriptions of the weather feel so visceral, it's almost like it's another character. It's also a delight to read a book with such a great sense of place, when that place is where I'm from.
The novel nails the gap between rhetoric and substance of climate action, and the infuriating policy stalemate. It deftly marries this with the impacts that's having in a range of personal contexts - it's based around the lives of three people affected in different ways - so it never gets stuffy. And the ending, as the weather closes in on the characters - is a page-turner.

[Harvey Molloy · Rating 5 out of 5]

As I write this a 120 kilometer wind batters the house. Emergency Weather is set the day after tomorrow in Aotearoa New Zealand. Farmers, politicians, scientists, kids – we see how heavy weather smashes into their lives. There’s real care in Jones’ writing and a wry humour often at work along with a clear sense of how we have arrived at these troubled times. Emergency Weather is an exciting, engrossing novel on how we might respond to the complex issues surrounding climate change. It has the power to inspire us.

[Andy Southall · Rating 5 out of 5]

A day after finishing this book, a sudden and savage storm struck Wellington. At 2.50pm the sun was shining on what seemed to be a pleasant summer day. Ten minutes later the sky turned black, violent winds blew out windows, hail was smashing into the deck and sheets of water poured from the gutters. And that was in a less extreme part of the storm’s path. Elsewhere it was much, much worse.

I thought immediately of Emergency Weather. And this is the power of this novel, for by following the lives of three ordinary people - a boy from up north, an environmentalist from Wellington and a widowed farmer from the south - it shows how a climate emergency isn’t something that will happen at an indeterminate point in the future, because climate emergencies are already here - with dire and frightening consequences.

As Allie, the farmer, says at the end, the only way we can solve climate change is for everyone to work together. I hope everyone who cares about a future reads this book.

[Kay Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is fiction but it reads like personal stories of many New Zealanders facing weather related challenges. People in rural communities are caught by slips, urban teenagers want climate action, a climate policy advisor and her engineer girlfriend, the Minister for Resilience and others. Even the guy from Federated Farmers wants action.

This novel is well grounded in science without preaching. Like Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future but shorter, more readable and very Kiwi. Many NZ readers will recognise themselves and the places characters visit. A good choice for #HolidayReading for people in Aotearoa New Zealand, especially if they're in #Wellington.

Looking back at a wrecked statue, Allie muses "No monument to pride lasts forever". I hope resistance to climate action crumbles as easily.

[Barbara Howe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Emergency Weather, set in the very near future in New Zealand, is climate fiction that follows three characters as a massive storm bears down on Wellington, the country's capital. The three characters are Allie, a newly widowed farmer's wife temporarily liberated from the daily grind of looking after a drought-stricken farm; Stephanie, a climate scientist frustrated over government inaction and business stonewalling; and Zeke, a Māori teen whose house was destroyed by a slip. The first two thirds of the novel is largely character study, showing us how their lives are already impacted by climate change and their reactions to their difficulties, as well as the reluctance of people in power to actually grapple with the problem. The scene of the Minister of Resilience praising the progress made in a governmental enquiry meeting that produced nothing more than an agreement that something should be done—but not by any participant who could actually do something—was particularly wince-inducing.

But just when it feels like the story is leaning a bit too much into earnest preaching to the choir, the pace picks up and the plot veers into thriller/disaster movie territory. The focus switches to simple survival of the monster storm. The impacts are brutal, but there is hope, too, in the actions of the scientists and climate activists pushing for decarbonisation, and in the personal connections made by people helping each other out in an emergency.

The things I like about this novel include the strong Kiwi flavour, from life on a dairy farm to the streets of Wellington, as well as the contrast between the White scientist's privileged life and the Māori boy's encounter with racist police. (If you aren't familiar with Te reo Māori—the Māori language--you might want to keep a tab with the Māori dictionary open while you read, although most of the Māori words should be fairly obvious from context.)

A good story. I wish I could say it was over the top, or not likely any time soon, but I've already lived through some scary storms. Emergency Weather's monster storm feels all too real.

[Octavia Cade · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novella is one of those very-near-future climate pieces... so near-future that it hardly feels like the future at all (or even science fiction, for that matter). There's been enough severe weather events in the past couple of years in New Zealand that the massive storm at the centre of the story here feels all too plausible. Part of that plausibility, I'm sure, is the recognisability of the setting. I know the places described, and if I haven't sat out a storm in Wellington airport, I had to spend the night in Auckland airport earlier this year, trapped by floods and with the rain coming through the ceiling. Not pleasant.

Also recognisable are the characters. There's a variety of them, from displaced teens to exhausted scientists to despairing farmers, and there's nothing unusual about them. They're people anyone who lives in NZ would meet every day, and it's easy to feel for them because they're so clearly drawn from life. I think what makes this story so affecting, though, is the sense of... not quite apathy, but the banging-your-head-against-the-wall frustration that comes from trying to get a nation of people with disparate interests to draw together in the face of coming disaster. That emergency weather that left me stuck in Auckland airport, that ravaged the East Coast, that caused those landslides in Nelson... it's not going away. There's going to be more of it. Lots more. We won't have the option of prevarication much longer, though I'm sure some people will still try. What makes Emergency Weather fundamentally hopeful for me, however, is that familiarity of character. I feel for them all. I think most readers will feel for them. That empathy encourages working-together rather than working-against, or at least I hope it does.

We're going to need it.

[MH · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think I preferred it when books like this were pitched as SF rather than modern lit. For the obvious reason, but also because of the different writing style.

This follows three people going about their lives against the backdrop of the climate crisis. Which is fine as far as it goes, but also a little dull. We live that every day; so a story doesn't tell us anything new. Then bam! there's a horrific storm out of nowhere, and some hijinks to escape it. Some hint that things might change a bit after that, but not really much resolution. The most obvious comparison is Forty Signs of Rain, which has a similar plot structure - except that its leadup said things about the role of science in policymaking, and made arguments about the role of science in society (oh, and tigers). There's not really any of that here - just three people's ordinary joys and frustrations. I was honestly hoping for a little bit more. On the positive side, it was a quick easy read.

[Marcus Hobson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a story told by three narrators - Allie, Zeke and Stephanie. The thing that links them, only remotely at first, is the climate crisis.
Allie is a farmer’s wife initially struggling with the drought, Zeke is a teenager whose family home is washed off its foundations and Stephanie is a government climate advisor.
While I like stories with multiple threads, these work well on an individual basis but don’t quite hold together so well as a single unified story.
Absolutely applaud the use of climate change to build the stories around. More of us need to feel the reality of the looming threat.

[Joe Ready · Rating 5 out of 5]

A perspective that being a Wellingtonian myself it could very well be a reality! The characters portrayed in the story definitely made you think about the potential impacts and how it could impact our communities.

[Cat Randle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant and frightening. Read it and act.