There Is Hope is here
The first novel of the Museum of Life universe—now available as an ebook
Heat is the venerable enemy.
Hope is what remains.
There Is Hope is a climate fiction novel that explores Europe in the year 2550, four and a half centuries after we have reached 5°C of global warming by the end of the twenty-first century.
Told as a mosaic of preserved memories curated in the year 3660, There Is Hope is a living testament to the suffering humanity endured in its darkest hour, and a cautionary tale for future generations.
Future generations will not be insulated from the world we destroyed for them. They will inherit digital memories of everything this Earth once was and is forever lost to them. Forever grieving for a world they will never know.
By the end of the twenty-first century, Homo sapiens will have decided the climate future of this planet. Humans don’t possess the technology to control the climate at a planetary scale—they never will. However, they have control over their actions. In less than seventy-five years, Earth could reach an average global warming of 2°C, 3°C, or 5°C—the small window of opportunity where humans get to decide is closing fast.
For those living today the future is an abstract notion.
For those living in the year 2550 it is already history.
There Is Hope gives a voice to those future generations we have already silenced.
The book
Here is how to step into the Dust Road.
June 1: Available as an eBook. Order here:
🌟 The print edition will be available soon.
Table of contents
Prologue
Human Island
The Day I Learned I Would Die
The Seed Grower
Seeds Of Resistance
The Dust Pirates
Hope At The End Of The World
The Cooperatives
Wildfire
There Is Hope
The First Diver
Epilogue
Design and illustrations
The print edition has been carefully designed, illustrated, and typeset by the amazing artist Barış Şehri.
About this edition
Even after multiple rounds of editing during the serialization, the manuscript was still asking for more. I returned to it through autumn and winter, working it through the 10-15-20 review method: ten passes for structure, fifteen for prose, twenty for the smallest details. Character arcs were deepened, descriptions smoothed, and dialogue was calibrated until the story landed on the page. This is the book There Is Hope always wanted to be.
Paid subscribers
As a patron of the Museum of Life universe, you'll receive a signed first edition of There Is Hope as soon as the print edition is ready this July or August. This launch offer is only available until the print release. After that, signed copies will be reserved for future books. If you want a signed first edition, now is the time.
There Is Hope is the prequel to a trilogy I'll begin drafting in summer 2026.
Epilogue (excerpt)
Wrapped like mummies in seaweed cloth, we enter the belly of the beast: the concrete jungles of abandoned cities in the Dust Bowl of Central Europe. I hope these records remain as a testament to time, to our suffering. If we survive, I hope future generations learn from us and never repeat the mistakes of our ancestors.
The infernal heat is trapped in the concrete. Patches of melting asphalt mix with the cracked, rugged soil. Our shoes are old and worn, our feet painfully callused. We stagger through the heat like agonizing beasts, in a row, putting one foot in front of the other. Our overseers wear biosuits—a luxury we’ll never be able to afford. They’re not here to torture us or keep us from escaping. There’s nowhere to go. There’s no water. There’s no food on the Dust Road. We’re lucky to forage for human scraps. Our destroyers have left so much behind in these cities. They’ve been scavenged for centuries, and they still give. They are our livelihood and our lifeblood.
We crawl through hollow windows like empty eye sockets, through doorways without doors, like toothless mouths. We’re swallowed by the beast—up and down ruined stairways, breaking walls to extract the wiring. It’s hard work. The tools are heavy. Our bodies are dry, stringy. Dust clings to our clothes, scratching our eyes like sandpaper. Our fingers bleed from pulling the wires out of the walls, from dismantling the nests of our destroyers piece by piece. There are so many buildings—streets intersecting with each other, all caked in dust. We scavenge until sunset.
After work is the only time we drink and feed: saline dripping into our veins, a seaweed broth fortified with vitamins and minerals. At night, we unfold the thermal tents and rest. This is how we survive. This is what our work is worth. We are the walking dead. We are the zombie children. There is no escape. No future.
In every carbon cycle, death is the engine of life.
The complete serialized version is available in the paid archive.
Early reviews
“A beautiful, but painful story... an eye-opening story of what our future could look like.”—Tasha Schiedel, NetGalley
“The world is immersive and well thought-out. The book's overall structure is laid out as a series of interconnected memory logs from several key players in the story. This layout provided variety to the storytelling and also introduced the reader to different regions, cultures, and perspectives.”—Faith Streeter, NetGalley
“A book that keeps me thinking about it for a long time.”—Candice Hiles, NetGalley
Thank you for being part of this world.
Claudia Befu
Yay!!! How do I get my print copy??? This looks absolutely stunning!!!