This July 4 weekend has the potential to be soul-crushing. On the East Coast, a brutal heat wave is reminding everyone that the climate crisis is not some future abstraction, but an extremely scary present-tense physical condition. In Europe, another heat wave has already killed more than 1,300 people. Elsewhere in the U.S., dozens of large wildfires are burning, drought is expanding, and the powers that be are doing everything they can to ensure this is not only the hottest summer on record, but the coldest summer for the rest of our lives.
So if your temptation is to give in to doomerism right now, I totally get it. But if you’re looking for a reason not to—and if you have some free time to dive into fiction over the holiday weekend—I recommend picking up Retro, a new novel by author Jessica M. Goldstein.
The book’s main character, Ash, is a struggling actress dealing with similar feelings of despair and hopelessness about the future. And then she gets a job at Retro, a travel agency dedicated to taking wealthy tourists on highly curated trips to the past. And slowly, her perspective begins to shift—but maybe not for the reasons you’d expect.
What I love about Retro is that it doesn’t answer that feeling with some cheesy conversion to optimism. It offers something I find far more realistic and useful: the idea that you can be cynical, but you don’t have to be an asshole. You can know the future is uncertain, and still refuse to abandon it. You can be furious, scared, and nostalgic for what we’ve already lost—and still say, basically: screw it. I’m going to try anyway.
Bias alert: Jess is also one of my best friends. I don’t really know how to talk about fiction books as a critic, but I do know how to dish with my girl about climate dread, nostalgia, evil tech billionaires, the rules (and carbon intensity) of time travel, and the romance of platonic friendship.
That’s what today’s podcast is: a tonic for the part of your brain that keeps whispering that the future is already lost. We talk about why Retro wouldn’t exist without Jess’s own feelings about climate change, why doomerism can feel so seductive, and why the unknowability of the future is not a reason to give up on it—but the very reason not to.
At the end of our conversation, I asked Jess to make her final pitch to a climate-concerned reader. Here’s what she said:
I think that Retro will speak to anybody who wants to be hopeful about the future but is struggling to do it. And anybody who has ever felt that temptation to give in to the feeling of, ‘God, things were better before.’ And anybody who, from a place of maybe even deeply loving your life and being knowledgeable about the world, looks out at the future and thinks, I don’t want to have to go there.
But you don’t want to feel that way, because you know that feeling that way is giving in to the forces of evil and fossil fuels. I think Retro will really speak to you. It’s a way to meditate on those big, deep, complicated ideas while also—if I can say this about my own book—having such a good time. Because it’s also full of parties and romance and adventure and humor. And it’s a big epic story.
You can find our full conversation at the top of this newsletter, on any of your podcast apps, or on YouTube. Just a heads up, we start diving into spoilers about halfway through the conversation, but we give a pretty explicit warning beforehand.
You can buy Retro here (or, for U.K. readers, here), or pick it up at your local public library.
