Pacifica Author Kristen Simmons on the Terrifying Science Behind her New Novel

Trash islands. Coral Bleaching. Melting permafrost and ice caps. All things I knew nothing about until I started writing Pacifica.
For years I carried around the stories of my family. My great-grandmother was in Hawaii during the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and was later taken by the FBI to an internment camp, part of the government-sanctioned removal of Japanese people from declared military zones (in that time, most of the West Coast and Hawaii). People had always told me to write about her experiences, but whenever I closed my eyes, I didn’t see a sandy camp in Texas, or American loyalty questionnaires. I saw a sky filled with lightning, and crashing seas. I saw families being ripped apart, with no idea when (or if) they would find each other again.
Then I read an article on the Pacific gyre and the conglomeration of trash that gathers there (now visible from space!), and I knew I had a setting for my story.
I’m not the kind of writer who details the world the way most people see it. I process the things I experience through the lens of fiction, and in my mind, my great-grandmother’s internment was definitely dystopian.
Over the next year, I began my research on the world I envisioned—a world in ruins, covered with trash—and quickly learned my setting was not so different from scientific projections of the future. I learned how climate change would alter surface temperatures, melting the ice caps over time, and how in this warmer water, coral expels algae but can’t survive without it.
This poses a problem for the 25% of marine species that need coral to survive.
I read about how drops in marine life would strangle the fishing industry, and how the warmer temperatures would kill the smallest animals in the food chain—like phytoplankton, who consume carbon dioxide and produce almost half of the world’s oxygen. I did interviews with a representative from the Environmental Protection Agency who talked to me about plastic in the oceans, and how one day so much might gather, people could actually live on it.
Internment, in my mind, had turned into an island of trash, floating in the ocean.
The research rabbit hole only deepened. I read about modified rainfall patterns, storm surges, and shifts in migration and growing seasons. How the shorelines will recede if the oceans rise, and how diseases like malaria, a game-changer in Pacifica, can decimate those without the means to protect themselves. I envisioned people fighting over resources, while fear and hysteria grew.
It sounded a lot like the war my great-grandmother and her children knew.
I didn’t mean for Pacifica to become a book about climate change, but that’s where the research took me. It turned my family’s journey into a struggle for survival in a world falling to ruins. It brought pirates alive in my imagination—the only people I could see thriving in the world I’d created.
And above all, it turned into a reality check for me. If we don’t do our part to save this planet, the next generations may find themselves living in the world of Pacifica.
Kristen Simmons’ Pacifica is on sale now.