A writer and author of literary climate fiction series, The Steep Climes Quartet, who also writes about climate fiction and climate change science, technology and policies.
I am a writer and the author of the literary climate fiction series, The Steep Climes Quartet. Book One, Kill Well, was published in September 2023; Dear Josephine was published in March 2025, and Over Brooklyn Hills published in June 2026. The last book, Farm to Me, is in manuscript.
I also write essays and publish analyses on climate change science, technology, and policies on my website, and my Substack where I also explore climate fiction through reviews and essays. For the last several years, I have been giving talks on climate change and climate fiction. I often start my talks by mentioning that, as a ninth grader, I and a school friend produced a short documentary on pollution and greenhouse gases; I do this not to boast of my prescience but to show that the world has long known about the dangers of global warming.
I started in the publishing industry as a developmental and acquisitions editor but switched in the mid-1980s to electronic publishing where I worked as the editor of several digital publishing/multimedia trade periodicals and then worked as an analyst focused on digital publishing technologies and business practices. Exhausted by the abstract quality of this work and the constant learning curve inherent in developing technologies and applications, I retreated to the concrete work of the plastic arts with Arch Art, an assemblage sculpture studio that also tried to build a wholesale production of one-of-a-kind lighting fixtures and lamps; the website remains extant.
Later I founded Retrosheath, a deep energy retrofit digital tools start-up. After four years of seeking investors and chasing research grants, the net result of my efforts was the joke “Who knew you needed capital to start a business?” The effort also got me deep into energy policies and climate change research.
I’m a member of Citizens’ Climate Lobby Berkshires Chapter and 350Mass.Org/ Berkshire Node.
I’ve been writing fiction and poetry for decades (and hope one day to get good at it!), but my writing climate fiction began in 2015 and I’m closing in on the end of my four-book climate fiction series.
Longer David has contributed an essay for Longer, our feature sharing members' works that offer a deeper exploration of a topic than is possible with our blog posts: Telling Stories about Climate Change, in August 2026.
David's ClimateCultures posts
