In another of our interview series with Habitat Press authors, we recently spoke to Jan Lee, co-author of Fairhaven and Defying Futility. Both are published by Habitat Press.
Here’s our Q&A with Jan…
Habitat Press published both your first book, Fairhaven, and your second book, Defying Futility. Can you describe how they are related?
Fairhaven – A Novel of Climate Optimism is a near-future story of Grace Chan, a Malaysian engineer who finds herself at the forefront of climate action: physical, scientific, and eventually political. One of the ways she copes with her climate anxiety is by writing allegorical stories. Defying Futility – The Fairhaven Stories is a collection of “Grace’s” stories.
Tell us a bit more about Defying Futility.
The central conceit of Defying Futility is to narrate real-life disasters, like the sinking of the Titanic or the Challenger explosion, as if they had gone otherwise. The accounts (except for two) are told from the point of view of one of the characters, in a kind of alternate universe in which the disaster is averted or its impact mitigated. For instance, the Titanic still sinks, but the passengers are saved. Some of the characters are fictional, but others are fictionalised versions of real people.
Climate fiction is about the future – so why do you write about the past?
Each of the stories in Defying Futility includes a couple of explanatory paragraphs that directly map the narrative onto a “moral of the story” about how we can tackle the current climate crisis and avert its worst effects. These include lessons like “Speak up to authority when it’s important”, “Act early”, “Listen to nature”, “Learn from history”, and “Find alternative ways to galvanize action”.
Both Fairhaven and Defying Futility are written by you and your co-author Steve Willis. What is it like writing in collaboration?
This partnership began in April 2023. Steve contacted me via LinkedIn, asking if I was interested in reading No More Fairy Tales, the story collection he’d recently spearheaded with Habitat Press. We’ve ended up collaborating on several books together since. It works well because we have a shared vision combined with complementary skill sets.
He brings a comprehensive knowledge of climate engineering solutions. I bring several decades of experience as a fiction writer, editor, and corporate sustainability officer. Steve lives in Malaysia and I live in Portugal (formerly in Hong Kong). Many people are surprised to learn that we wrote together for a year before we met in person – the day before Fairhaven was launched. Practically speaking, we depend heavily on Google Docs (and Google Meet).
The stories in Defying Futility are set all over the world, from Buckingham Palace to a one-room schoolhouse in Iraq to a coal mine in South Africa. Why?
In both Fairhaven and Defying Futility, we aim to illustrate that the climate disaster is a truly global phenomenon. It must (and can!) be addressed by people from all walks of life. No matter who you are or what you do, you have a role to play.
You said that two of the stories in Defying Futility are different from the others. In what way?
One is a what-if story set in Brazil, about a world in which the Montreal Protocol was never signed, and the hole in the ozone layer continued to grow. Another is a near-future story about a California family who aims to survive the inevitable next wildfire.
What’s next for Jan Lee and Steve Willis?
Grace Chan’s story is far from over. We have completed the second book in the Fairhaven series and are working on the third and fourth. (You can read the opening chapters here.) At the same time, following interest from a film production company, we have developed a screenplay for the pilot episode of a Fairhaven TV series. Stay tuned!
Thanks for being our Author of the Month!
A pleasure!