Author J. Stewart Willis says that even though his new novel, Three Degrees and Gone, is set in the future, he doesn’t consider it a work of science fiction. “All the futuristic books [create] architectural wonders, people flying around in cars,” he says. “That didn’t seem real to me. I tried to conceive of something that looked more real. I started wondering about what really happens when we have global warming. That was the genesis of this book.”

Willis wanted to depict the future realistically. His background includes years of military service and over a decade of work for a tech company in Virginia, where he now lives. He was also a college professor of physics; his science background came in handy when writing about how climate change will further alter the physical world. “I’m an old man,” Willis jokes. “I’ve been around a while.”

Kirkus Reviews calls Three Degrees and Gone “an exceptional story” but offers one caveat: “Readers who are looking for future-tech thrills or creatively envisioned ruins in an apocalyptic-dystopic milieu may be disappointed….Instead, this is an elemental drama of fairly ordinary, often uncouth people on an arduous, quavering journey.”

Though Willis’ first idea was to write a book addressing the accelerating climate crisis, he was also interested in another pressing topic: migration. “I wanted to use what was happening at the Mexican border to represent what might happen in the future,” he says. Three Degrees and Gone shifts the border in question to the north. 

Set in 2086 in a vastly changed American landscape, the novelfollows three families, each on their own fraught journey north. The book explores the politics, desperation, and intrigue behind these attempts to relocate to Canada, which is trying to close its border to immigrants.

In Texas, Frank Wilkins, abusive husband and disgruntled employee of a large oil company, packs up his family and heads north; his wife, Dana, doesn’t figure out his true agenda till later. In Chicago, Cynthia Sherwood is eager to leave her unfaithful husband, but she has to rely on an illegal smuggling operation to get across the Canadian border. And in Georgia, when Harry Sykes’ home is destroyed in a hurricane, he steals money from a relief fund to finance the move to Canada.

As a writer, Willis knows big ideas and imagined worlds have to be rooted in strong characters. That’s why his focus is always on people. “I write all my books to try to deal with ordinary people doing little, exceptional things,” he says.

Though Willis eschews many of the more familiar trappings of SF, some of his inventive elements nod to the genre. In Three Degrees and Gone, most Americans have “identity implants,” which are “small electronic implants behind the lobe of each ear.” They allow the government to maintain a national database and track its citizens. In the South, which is plagued by “terrible storms and tornadoes,” most stores are underground, delivering items to the surface on command.

In a prologue that introduces the reader to the new realities of the near future, Willis’ character Dana Wilkins details life in the late-21st century. “Boring” is one way she describes it, but she has plenty more to say: “I live in amazement of what a three-degree rise in the average global temperature has wrought,” she says. She goes on:

Where have the migrants gone? Certainly not to the west where people had gone 150 years before when they escaped the Dust Bowl….Going west meant drought and fire. No, in the late 21st century, migrants headed north. Those coming from the Gulf Coast went at least as far as Missouri, Kansas, and Kentucky, where exhaustion and hunger forced them to stop.

Willis wrote the Texas storyline first, but he quickly realized his novel needed a broader view of life in America. He expanded the story to include the two other narrative threads. Still, the three families are a miniscule fraction of the lives affected by the climate future Willis imagines. “They represent only a part of what’s going on in the grand scheme of things.”

Willis says he’s been criticized for writing a book that’s too depressing. But reality can be depressing, he points out. And the future? Maybe even more so. “There are times I think I may have lived in the best years anybody ever lived in,” he says. “What’s happening to the climate—the future may not be as bright as what I lived through in the past 80 years. That is a depressing thought. 

Though Three Degrees and Gone is an ambitious book of many characters and an extensively reimagined world, Willis relates that the writing proceeded smoothly after he had his premise. That’s always how he begins: from an idea, a single idea. The rest of the book comes easily to him. “Once I get started,” he says, “I pretty much write the book straight through.”

The breadth of Willis’ background has helped source the driving ideas behind his other books. His novel Deadly Highway (2018) is about “government contracts on the interstate highway system,” a field he worked in for years. And Gestation Seven (2017), his first novel, is a scientific thriller about a rogue experiment; again, his science background was a useful resource.

Willis says his next project is a detective novel centered on a successful children’s author. The catch? She’s not the true author; her child is. Willis says he was ready to try something a little different. But no matter the genre, Willis always returns to his favorite subject: people, the lives they lead, the decisions they make. “There will always be good people,” he says. “And there will always be people who are not so good. I want to represent both sides—all the trials and tribulations.”

Walker Rutter-Bowman is a writer and teacher living in Washington, D.C.