"The Good Plan"

2019 Awake, Mikael. “The Good Plan.” Illus. Wesley Allsbrook. 2040 A.D. McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern 58 (Winter 2019): 77-67. PU

The story is set “somewhere in the Northern Hemisphere” but concerns Africa. The Good People have the Good Plan to wall themselves off from the rest of the world to protect themselves from refugees, whose memories they take. The protagonist, who is being escorted in chains back to Africa, describes what little he can remember of the Crisis that the Good People blame on everyone but themselves. The authors of the stories were each “assigned a specific climate event mentioned” in the 2018 UN climate report collaborating with experts recommended by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) who “provide a scientific backbone” for the stories while giving the writers free rein to determine how closely they adhered to that science” (6-7). The Introduction to the volume (7-12) is by Susan Casey-Lefkowitz, Chief Program Officer of the NDRC. The African American author is the child of formerly undocumented immigrants from Eritrea, has an MFA from Syracuse University, and teaches in the English Department at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania.