Photos by Texas Isaiah

I think that what were going to see, science fiction author Charlie Jane Anders tells me, is conflict over access to water. Were deep into a phone interview, and the topic of climate change has come up. As anyone who has read her work would expect, shes bursting with predictions gleaned from her research. Apart from water access issues, she also expects an increase in violent storms and food scarcity in the future.

I can walk down the street and get a million different kinds of cuisines, and in the supermarket theres an incredible selection of fruits and vegetables, she says. I think that may not always be the case.

In her work, Anders has looked further still into the future: Her new novel, The City in the Middle of the Night, is set on another planet threatened by climate change, centuries after humans relocated from a presumably dying Earth. Its a rather bleak image not the shiny techno-utopian futurism that promised us flying hoverboards.

Theres this discussion that always goes on in speculative fiction about whether you write optimistic or pessimistic stories, she says, or whether we can have the optimism of the old days of Star Trek this idea that were going to build a better future. And have we lost that? Can we get that back?

I always say that optimism and pessimism about the future really boiled down to optimism and pessimism about human nature. Are we going to destroy ourselves? Or are we going to be able to work together and fix some of the problems that weve caused?

Anders describes herself as a realist: Its a little of column A, and its a little of column B. Its not a brave new world, or even a Brave New World, but something messy in between.

Anders work is a study in duality, as she explores unfamiliar extremes while also figuring out how the distance between them can be traversed. Her breakout sci-fi/fantasy novel All the Birds in the Sky features a star-crossed couple who meet as misfit kids. One grows up to be a witch and the other becomes a tech geek, which puts them on different sides of a calamitous battle for the future of the planet. Its kind of magic versus science, or nature versus technology, Anders says.

Her latest, The City in the Middle of the Night, takes place on a tidally locked planet in other words, a planet that keeps the same face toward its sun throughout its orbit. Its a concept that Anders discovered while working for the science and tech blog io9.