In Allegra Hyde’s latest story collection, The Last Catastrophe, characters navigate a surreal and speculative world transformed by the climate crisis. They travel in RVs, receive packages from an all-knowing algorithm, foster lost and broken men, and prepare for a promenade in outer space, far away from the dying planet. These characters make mistakes and come together to try to fix them, reminding the reader of our collective potential to change our own climate catastrophe.
In this conversation, Allegra and I discuss crafting idealist characters, writing global weirdness, navigating what role writers have in addressing the climate crisis, and crafting the utopias we reach for in stories and in our lives.
Mialise Carney: Throughout the stories in The Last Catastrophe I noticed how many of the characters have this desire to preserve, help, or change their worlds, like the father and mother dressing up as a moose to save the last five moose so future generations might see the animals. In other stories that I’ve read about the climate crisis, apocalypse, and invasive modern technologies, I feel like I haven’t seen that level of empathy and curiosity for the characters. How did you craft this tone?
Allegra Hyde: I like to write characters who have agency, and who are oftentimes idealists. I’m drawn to people—in the real world and in fiction—who go out of their way to try to walk the talk, to make a difference, to have an impact on the world, as you said, both because that’s something that I hope to do as a person, and because I think it creates exciting fiction.
When you have big ideals, inevitably you run into practical concerns, challenges, and conflicts. So in a story like “The Tough Part,” where the parents dress up as a moose to try to save all the remaining moose, their goal is incredibly elusive; the realities of the world make achieving their goal nearly impossible for just one or two people.
Carney: It’s a way to humanize these characters, they have their own small problems but are trying to address the bigger issues in their worlds. I noticed this too in the way you write distinct first-person plural “we” characters in several stories, and there is often an ebb and flow between collective and individual voices. How did you approach creating distinct first-person plural characters for these individual stories?
Hyde: The first-person plural voice was a voice I just could not stop writing in. I’ve always been a fan of it; I love Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic. Even so, I didn’t mean to write so many stories in that mode. Ultimately, though, it felt like first person plural made sense for The Last Catastrophe—a collection that is trying to talk about what it means to be alive in the Anthropocene, which means being both an individual, but also being part of this collective body experiencing a collective emergency.
In terms of the practical craft of writing that voice, I tried to find ways to speak as a chorus, to capture a collective consciousness that is experiencing some things in a broad way, but also in a grouping of small specific ways. In “Mobilization,” for instance, which represents the perspective of many people driving around in RVs, we hear about the things the group is doing, where the group is going, but we also hear about the specific qualities of individuals in different RVs—such as the different foods they might eat or music they might listen to. In other words: I try to balance generalizations and groupings of individual specificity when writing in a first-person plural voice.
Because The Last Catastrophe often explores strange or even absurd concepts, it also felt important to really ground the stories in physical realities, in specific details and tangible things. I tried to load the stories with materiality—to list, for instance, every specific food the people in the RVs are buying; or to extensively describe the red color of Gatorade in “Afterglow.” In a story like that, the situation is pretty surreal: this character is drinking tons of Gatorade and turning colors, which isn’t physically possible. So balancing that oddity with tangible, recognizable things was a way to make the story function.
Carney: I’m glad you mentioned “Afterglow” because it’s one of my favorite stories in the collection. While the events of the story are very tense and reflective, it’s also very funny, as the woman drinks so much Gatorade after a break up, she turns all these colors. The tone is humorous but ultimately heartbreaking in the final paragraphs when we learn why she’s really drinking Gatorade. How do you approach writing humor into these stories without neglecting the meaning or the emotional center?
Hyde: Humor can be a way to invite a reader into a story, and to get a reader on board with a premise. To put this another way: Humor can be a bait-and-switch when it comes to talking about difficult subject matter, because writing about divorce, or writing about climate change, or writing about the hetero-patriarchy, it’s heavy, and in general people don’t really want to hear about it. But if you can find ways to access that subject matter in a sideways way, a humorous way, in a beautiful way, I think readers let down their guard and are more willing to go with you where you want to go in the story.
Carney: That reminds me of another story in this collection, “Endangered,” where you write about a world in which artists are kept in cages to be viewed and sustained by the ultrarich. I was curious about the title of the story, and it made me wonder, what role do you see artists and writers having in addressing the effects of climate change?
Hyde: I think artists and writers are really important in terms of addressing the climate crisis. Everybody, ultimately, is important—it’s an all hands on deck kind of situation—but artists and writers have the ability to make sense of a problem that otherwise seems vast and intangible, everywhere and nowhere, and that’s also really depressing. Artists and writers can find ways to present and interpret and understand what’s happening to us, and can also find ways to look towards the future and imagine alternative ways of living, better ways of living, and make alternative possibilities feel reachable through art.
The Last Catastrophe might not be purely utopian—in fact, it has a lot of dystopia in it—but my hope is that it offers up the possibility of human connection, human collaboration, human community, even in the face of the most challenging catastrophes. Ultimately, connection is all we have, but it’s also just what might save us.
Carney: That’s really powerful. I’m glad that you mentioned utopias because I noticed in your Twitter bio, you describe yourself as a “Utopia-Enthusiast.” I was surprised by how many of these stories are focused on the precipice of dystopia or characters that are already in dystopias. What do you love about utopias? And how do you see them appearing or not appearing in your stories?
Hyde: I find the human relationship to utopia fascinating. It might manifest as a sense of a lost utopia, it might manifest as a desire to find utopia, it might manifest as creating spaces that seem to be utopias, but that are actually dystopias. Perhaps the collection, in different ways, speaks to all those relationships—especially the last one in a story like, “The Future Is a Click Away.” That story depicts a consumer utopia in which people don’t do any of their shopping, or think about what they need, because an all-powerful algorithm has made their life really convenient. For many of us the convenience of such a world might sound like a utopia. But, as the story eventually shows, giving all our agency away to an algorithm is probably not a great idea.
Carney: That’s interesting, how even what we imagine is a utopia will likely have some issues or problems, like everything. What does your utopia look like? Or do you think there will always be problems in our world that people will have to navigate?
Hyde: I think that if utopia exists—in the real world beyond the realm of fiction—it’s ephemeral. In our lives as human beings we might experience a few singular moments of transcendent joy and balance and friendship and community. But, because of the way our world works, inevitably things will change and be in flux. I think that’s good, too. I don’t think that we actually want to live inside the Garden of Eden. We want to learn things and face challenges and have our hearts broken and problem-solve. That’s ultimately what it means to be alive.
Carney: Absolutely. I can see that idea in the final story “The Eaters,” about the vegan zombies where it feels like a utopia, but even they have their own problems.
Hyde: Totally. Within that story, the survivalist compound is, in a sense, a utopia of sustainability within this wasteland of vegan zombies. But of course that reality is challenged—and then upon close inspection, we realize the community was never quite perfect anyways.
Carney: That reminds me of something you spoke about in an interview with Jean Marc Ah-Sen in Catapult, where you describe the stories in The Last Catastrophe as stories of “global weirding,” a term that describes how climate change is causing our environment to act in strange, unexpected ways. What types of global weirding in the world inspired these stories?
Hyde: On one hand, it’s the global weirding that I think many people feel in their day-to-day life. For instance, this winter in Ohio, where I live, we had a polar vortex come through, then the winter became incredibly mild, and then spring came disturbingly early. We had tons of flowers coming up in March, which was weird. It wasn’t right. So in a way, my stories are coming from that first-hand experience.
But they’re also coming from research into what’s happening in the world beyond Ohio: such as huge gatherings of walruses in Alaska due to a loss of sea ice, or the bizarre coloration of coral reefs in the Philippines, or the mass mortality of thousands of antelope in Kazakhstan. To me, global weirding isn’t just about animal migration patterns changing and seasons fluctuating, however. Our human world is getting thrown out of whack as well. Our politics are getting stranger, our education systems, our technology, along with so much else.
What I tried to do in a lot of these stories was take this notion of global weirding and translate it into a human sphere in a way that hopefully captures a feeling of transformation that is both scary and disturbing and disastrous, but that also opens up a new space of potential and opportunity and possibility. Headlines about ecological phenomena are a huge catalyst for me; as a writer, my hope is that these strange realities resonate meaningfully when contextualized with human experiences.
Carney: Yeah, absolutely. You capture the tone of how it feels to live in this time, in terms of feeling like we’re not in the dystopia quite yet, but we’re experiencing a lot of these global weirdities. I want to go back to what you said about research. The story “Disruptions” begins with headlines from National Geographic. I’m always curious about how fiction writers approach research. What does your research process look like?
Hyde: I'm a magpie. I’m always collecting headlines, articles, things people send me. I’m going into Wikipedia wormholes. I’m jotting down overheard conversations in my notebook. My research is not in any way systematic—unless I really know what I want to write about. For instance, if I know I want to learn about how air pollution creates vivid sunsets, then I might do a rigorous, deep dive that’s more structured. But generally a lot of my research as a fiction writer just entails being out in the world listening, reading, collecting. I think useful information can be found in Scientific American and also in a grocery store checkout line. All those sources are valid.
Carney: It sounds like a pretty organic process, and I wondered too about your process writing the collection as a whole. The story “Zoo Suicides” was first published here in The Normal School back in 2015. Did you already have this collection in mind in 2015? What kind of work did you have to do to bring all of these stories together to create such cohesive themes and arcs?
Hyde: In 2015, I was just starting to think about global weirding and just starting to try to understand what it might mean to write about that concept in fiction. I knew at that time that I wanted to make climate change a central focus in my writing. It felt like a way that I could contribute to the environmental movement, at least in a small way. So I started writing short stories, including “Zoo Suicides.”
Around that same time, I also decided to embark on writing a novel. All told, I spent about five years working on Eleutheria—a novel about a militant group of environmentalists in the Bahamas—only occasionally pausing to write more short stories. Once I sold that novel, though, I was finally able to dedicate myself to finishing the story collection. I had all these pent up ideas, many stemming from research that didn’t make it into the novel. During the pandemic lockdown, I wrote a huge chunk of The Last Catastrophe, building out from the original stories, and the collection became complete.
Carney: Congratulations again on The Last Catastrophe, and thanks for sharing these stories with us. What do you hope stays with your readers long after they’ve finished the last story in your collection?
Hyde: I hope that readers feel a sense of wonder for our natural world alongside a sense of urgency about the peril that our environment is in. I hope that readers see the incredible collective potential we have as human beings—and that we do still have the capacity to change course from where we’re currently heading.
Allegra Hyde is the author of Eleutheria, which was named a "Best Book of 2022" by The New Yorker and shortlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. She is also the author of the story collection, Of This New World, which won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award. Her second story collection, The Last Catastrophe, was published in March 2023 by Vintage.
Mialise Carney is a writer and MFA candidate at California State University, Fresno. She is the senior fiction editor at The Normal School, and her writing has appeared in swamp pink, The Boiler, and Booth, among others.
Author photo: Tanya Rosen-Jones