ISSUE #11 | An Interview with Sim Kern
SIM KERN is an environmental journalist and writer of speculative fiction. You can find links to all their published work at simkern.com.
Read an excerpt from “Real Sugar is Hard to Find,” their heartfelt climate fiction (cli-fi) tale of family, class, and desserts in Issue #11, Snake Eyes.
Shortly after doing the interview Sim announced a three-book deal with Stelliform Press! Stay tuned for their full-length Cli-Fi debute, Seeds of the Swarm, in the fall of 2022.
PLANET SCUMM: How does your journalism inform your fiction?
SIM KERN: To be honest, I’m very new to journalism—just started earlier this year—so if anything, I’m seeing my experience as a fiction writer impact my journalism. I can cut loose and be creative with language as I’m reporting a story, and I know how to tug peoples’ heartstrings with imagery and metaphor. What I’m hoping to take from journalism back to my fiction is the ability to keep to a strict word count and work quickly towards deadlines. I’d love to be able to enter more themed short story anthologies and competitions, but as it stands, I usually can't work quickly enough to respond to themed submissions.
PS: How do you engage with hope and fear in cli-fi?
SK: My climate fiction usually balances both, and you can see that in “Real Sugar is Hard to Find.” I do intend to scare my readers a bit by taking climate predictions and making them viscerally real for the characters. For this story, that prediction was about the coming climate-related food scarcities. Something we take so for granted, like baking a birthday cake, gets a lot more complicated when the regions of the world where we grow sugar can no longer support that crop.
At the same time that I’m predicting a hard road ahead, there’s the element of hope in the cake itself. People in the throes of climate despair tend to forget that there will be cake—and birthday parties, joy, jokes, dancing, babies, and falling in love—for as long as there’s a handful of humans left on this earth. So this mother-son quest to bake a real cake for a troubled loved one is in defiance of that despair.
Too many people start learning about the climate crisis and throw their hands in the air before doing literally anything about it. They’re so ready to give up on the human race and life on earth, when we’re only just getting started with this mass extinction, and there is plenty of good stuff left to save. Giving up before you’ve even started fighting empowers the earth-eating status quo, and I won’t stand for it.
That’s also what always irked me about the Flannery O’Connor story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” which was a loose structural inspiration here. That story was taught to me multiple times throughout high school and my undergraduate career as this example of a perfect short story. While I admire O’Connor’s skillful writing, I find myself annoyed with her bleakness and totally cynical view of humanity. Her criminals are cartoonishly evil, and their victims are selfish and unlikable. What are tenth graders supposed to take from that exactly? How does that help? So somehow O’Connor’s cynicism got wrapped up with the climate nihilists in my head, and this story was my response to both of them.
PS: What writers did you look up to as a fledgling author?
SK: If you mean who did I look up to when I was a kid, that would be witty scifi and fantasy writers like Patricia C. Wrede, Douglas Adams, and Terry Pratchett. I hope that sense of humor comes through in the banter between Peter and his mother and some of the more absurd situations they find themselves in.
If you mean who did I look up to when I started writing seriously as an adult, I’d say I was most strongly influenced by writers like N.K. Jemisin, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Octavia Butler. I strive to have their thematic and philosophical integrity, if that makes sense. Put another way, I’m an anti-capitalist writer, and I hope that comes through in every story.
PS: Which of your five senses would you like supernaturally heightened?
SK: This is one of those fun party questions, and I’m gonna do the thing I’m great for at parties, which is bring the mood crashing way down with a bleak, way-too-real answer. The first thing that occurred to me was that I’d like to have a heightened sense of smell. Specifically, I’d like to have such a keen sense of smell that I could detect the chemical compounds of the air pollution that’s continually getting released in East Houston, where I live.
My neighborhood is a few miles from the Houston ship channel, where you’ll find the largest petrochemical infrastructure in the US. I don’t live in a “fenceline neighborhood”--we have a few-mile-wide buffer between us and all these chemical plants and refineries. Still, because of my zip code, me and my kids are significantly more likely to get cancer than folks who live ten miles or more away. Every few weeks there are industrial accidents and chemical leaks, and a couple times a year there are serious explosions or fires that require residents to shelter-in-place, often while they’re breathing in noxious, cancer-causing fumes from the clouds of black smoke darkening the sky.
Every time we play outside, I worry if the air is safe for my kids. I’d like a nose that could tell me, “Hey, there’s trace amounts of Butadiene in the air right now, we gotta go inside.” Hell, while we’re dreaming, let’s pretend this is a fantasy world where some kind of environmental justice exists for my neighborhood. Along with my superpowered sense of smell, how about a world where I could use it to take down evil polluters, Scooby-Doo style? “Hey EPA, my sniffer’s telling me there’s a hydrogen cyanide leak coming from the Valero plant!” and some regulatory body actually cared! That would be wild.
There I go getting cynical! It's hard to keep hope for climate solutions alive when you live in Texas. It takes continual practice. I suppose that's why I keep writing optimistic stories set in the climate-ravaged future—to convince myself to keep fighting as much as anyone.
