“A Catalog of 21st Century Ghosts”

2024 Murphy, Pat[rice Anne] (b. 1955). “A Catalog of 21^st Century Ghosts.” Lightspeed, no. 175 (December 2024). with an Author Spotlight interview by Mayookh Barua. Rpt. in The Year’s Best Science Fiction on Earth 3. Ed. Allan Kaster (Barker, TX: Infinivox, 2025), 9-24. PSt 978-1-88461-288-6

The story is set after attempts to stop climate change had failed, and the point-of-view character is an elderly woman who was involved in one of the too little, too late projects. In the story she is riding an electric bicycle across the U.S. from New York City to San Francisco observing the damage that climate change has done visiting the remaining sites where artists had created ghosts, holographic projections of individuals where “magnetic fields shape your emotions” (13). Female author.