Allegra Hyde: On Writing Into Hope and Embracing ‘Global Weirding’ Amid Our All-Too-Surreal Climate Crisis
If you’re reading this on the internet, there’s a good chance the algorithm knows a bit about you. Your habits. Your rhythms. But in The Future is a Click Away, one of the short stories in Allegra Hyde’s latest short story collection, The Last Catastrophe (Vintage, 2023) the algorithm plans ahead. It orders packages which come before we even know we need them. Because remember: The algorithm knows your thoughts. Understands your needs. It’s safe and secure inside your head.
Or does the algorithm just want you to think that?
Hyde is no stranger to speculative fiction, especially concerning climate and technology. Hyde embraces the surreal reality of our ongoing climate crisis. She’s written a lot of climate weirdness between her novel Eleutheria (Vintage, 2022) and her first short story collection Of This New World (University of Iowa Press, 2016). But The Last Catastrophe asks a special question: What if all of this despair is met with hope? Even better: What if all of this human and planetary pain and suffering is met with optimism?
The Last Catastrophe is an outrageously original, smart, and ultimately tender short story collection that grounds in a near-distant future of mass climate disaster, AI technology, surveillance, and a girl with a unicorn on her forehead who goes unnoticed in New York City, as one does. I was lucky to speak with Hyde on the phone to discuss how her many moves have informed both her writing process and her understanding of climate, as well as her interest in “global weirding” and why optimism is so centered in this utterly strange and delightful science fiction collection.
MARISSA HIGGINS: Do you find yourself thinking about climate change and the changing geography of places when you travel or move?
ALLEGRA HYDE: Oh, absolutely. For better or worse, I'm always thinking about climate change. And listening to how people talk about it in different regions. In Idaho, it's been interesting hearing people talk about how this amount of snow reminds them of how it used to be; in recent memory, they haven't been getting this amount of snow. It feels like a temporary return to past patterns, and they're hoping it will refill the lakes and bodies of water that desperately need it.
Before Idaho, I was visiting my parents in New Hampshire and hearing about the weird fall season; trees budding when they should have been kind of shut down for winter. I try to listen and pay attention to what's happening in these spaces that I'm moving through and how people are reacting to our changing world.
MH: Are you originally from New Hampshire?
AH: I am. I grew up in a small town and lived out in the woods, so the natural world has always been very present for me.
MH: Do you feel like growing up in an area with such marked seasons affected your interest or understanding of climate norms and climate change
AH: Maybe? I imagine every place in the world affected by climate change, but definitely in New Hampshire we do have really distinct seasons and in a small kind of pretty rural town, what's happening with the weather, what's happening with plant life, affects everyone. If there's an ice storm and it knocks out the power, you have to cope with that, and it's you and your neighbors dealing with it. I think our vulnerability, our interconnectedness, with the natural world was always conspicuous to me.
MH: Did any climate experiences or natural disasters from your lived life inform this collection? Or did you pull more from the imagination?
AH: I think all kinds of experiences go into books; the idea of catastrophe in the book is both literal and figurative. I lived in Houston during Hurricane Harvey. It was an intense experience, but I also feel really fortunate compared to the experiences other folks had. I think in any of these significant weather events I was part of, what stands out is the incredible force of nature.
I think people do generally come together in disaster. People open up their homes and connect. There's a sense of community and possibility as well. In this collection I’m trying to express the sense of disaster that feels both present and imminent, but also to thread the possibility of community connection that often runs alongside catastrophe.
MH: How is community building and community aid in dialogue with queerness in this collection?
AH: Such an important part of facing oppression as individuals is finding community and mutual aid. For queer people, finding queer spaces and queer communities is such a big part of pushing back on oppressive forces.
MH: Do you feel like the COVID-19 pandemic impacted your perspective on catastrophes and disasters?
AH: Some of these stories I wrote starting in 2014, but over half of them I wrote during the most intense part of the pandemic lockdown. They’re definitely infused with that sense of global catastrophe. I was struck by the magnitude of what was happening, the horror and terror of it. But also in the way that—almost on a dime—our whole reality could shift.
I actually got divorced in March 2020, so I was in this sudden moment of personal catastrophe and heartbreak and pain, and then I was surrounded by global catastrophe and crisis and pain. And post divorce, I felt this incredible sense of new freedom and possibility, and that’s been kind of mixed up in this collection as well.
MH: Can you talk some about what “global weirding” is and how the concept appears in your work?
I consider “global weirding” to be a kind of overarching interest of this collection. It’s not my term, but it’s not as widely used or known as it could be. It's another way of thinking about global warming and climate change that is less politicized and, in some ways, even more accurate. It's not just temperature rising, it's ecological and human systems getting thrown out of whack by virtue of climatological shifts.
I take that as a metaphorical anchor in these speculative scenarios, things getting kind of out of whack or operating in odd ways to capture that sense of what it means to be alive now and what it may mean in the future.
MH: Do you feel like “global weirding” is more hopeful or optimistic than a term like climate change?
AH: I think it might be! I think the word weirding is a little more neutral. And I think weirdness can be good! Global weirding could mean that there’s opportunities for alternate community, family, and political systems that are better than what we have today. Because the norm isn’t necessarily…. great.
MH: How did you order the stories in this collection?
AH: I did struggle with the order of these stories. I worked really closely with my editor [at Vintage] Caitlin Landuyt, trying to figure out how to tell a bigger story. In sequencing these smaller pieces, we decided early on that the novella should go at the end because it's so long.
With the other stories, we ended up thinking about it in terms of moving further and further from a familiar reality. Spacing them out is also thinking about how these pieces move us through a larger narrative with different voices and perspectives.
MH: You’ve written and published a lot of fiction, including one novel and two short story collections in just a few years. What’s your artistic career trajectory been like?
AH: It has been interesting having the story collection come out right after my novel. At the same time, it feels right because I think the stories are really siblings or cousins. In many ways, they're both born from being immersed in climate research, traveling, and observing how people are navigating climate change. The novel is already very crowded with ideas and in some ways, the story collection contains concepts I came across while researching the novel and then I was able to explore in stories.
My first book I wrote, which came out in 2016, was another story collection that called up this new world. That collection was interested in the idea of utopia; paradise lost and found and destroyed. I think it's part of an ongoing interest in what we're losing, but also what we still might find out there.
I really believe in the idea of an artistic body of work. All these books are just part of one long exploration and one long effort to try to get a certain kind of truth. And I don't know if I'll ever truly get there or say what I want to say, but I'm gonna keep trying.
Allegra Hyde is the author of the story collection THE LAST CATASTROPHE and the novel ELEUTHERIA, which was named a "Best Book of 2022" by The New Yorker. Her debut story collection OF THIS NEW WORLD won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award. Hyde has also received three Pushcart Prizes and her writing has been anthologized in Best American Travel Writing, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions. She has received fellowships and grants from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, The Elizabeth George Foundation, the U.S. Fulbright Commission, and elsewhere. She teaches at Oberlin College.
Marissa Higgins is a lesbian writer whose debut novel A GOOD HAPPY GIRL is out with Catapult in April 2024. You can find her at twitter.com/marissahiggins_.