The format that people actually finish

I write executive summaries for a living. Findings, implications, recommendations, three pages maximum. I have written hundreds of them about climate risk, biodiversity, emissions trajectories, water stress. The research is solid. The format was designed for people who have already decided. I started writing cli-fi, climate fiction, in 2020, partly from frustration and partly from a genuine belief that the novel form can do what the briefing cannot. A character experiencing a specific kind of summer in 2041 carries information in a way that a projected temperature range does not. People finish novels. They don't finish technical annexes. I live in the Östermalm neighbourhood and I write on weekend mornings. My current project is a novel set in Sweden in the late 2030s during a period of rapid coastal retreat affecting the Stockholm archipelago. It is not a disaster narrative. It's a character study of the people who decide to stay on the islands and the people who decide to leave, and the ordinary life that continues inside both decisions. I've been reading *The Ministry for the Future* carefully, not as a model but as a point of argument. Kim Stanley Robinson would give my characters more optimism than I think they've earned.