‘To our planet, with love’

Wolsley

St. Vital

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 04/10/2023 (764 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

“I could’ve picked anywhere else to live, but something had brought me here. If pressed, I could say the more central location made it easy to traverse between different parts of the city when need arose, or the proximity to the surface brought fresher air, some real sunlight, and true weather … But really, I wasn’t sure why.”

The above passage is an excerpt from Bounty, the debut ‘climate fiction’ (or cli-fi) novel by Winnipeg author Jason Pchajek. The book — published by Ravenstone, a local subsidiary of Turnstone Press — is the first in a planned series of three, and is set more than a century into the future, in a version of Winnipeg which has been affected by climate change and where people have been forced to settle underneath the city.

Pchajek’s book tells the story of bounty hunter Nikos Wulf, and a band of teammates he meets along the way, as he tries to protect his beloved home and the fragile ecological structure preventing climate collapse. When faced with a mortal threat, Wulf is forced to confront himself and question the justice he’s been trained to uphold.

Pchajek, who now lives in Wolseley but grew up in St. Vital, has been working on Bounty since 2016. But he said he’s been dreaming of having his own work on bookshelves since he was seven.

“(I was) really enjoying where (this was) going,” Pchajek said when asked when he knew he had a story that could become a novel. “I found myself thinking about the story all the time, where I wanted things to go … I was like, ‘This is the one I want to take to the end and try and get out there for people to enjoy.’ A few years later, I got the offer from Turnstone and the rest is history.”

Bounty was officially launched at McNally Robinson Booksellers on Sept. 27, with a reading by Pchajek followed by a question-and-answer panel hosted by GMB Chomichuk, writer and co-host of the Super Pulp Science podcast.

In the hot seat, Pchajek, 29, talked about climate change crisis, sociology — in which he holds a master’s degree — and the lengthy process of writing and editing a novel for the first time.

“Climate fiction, as a genre, really deals with the idea of how we as a society … politically, socially, financially, technologically, deal with the reality of climate change and how that is going to change certain things,” he said. “Because climate change is already changing our world. We’re in the era of climate change. It’s changing how we interact with the environment around us, and it really is going to impact the way that we build our cities and infrastructure, and how we make business and political decisions moving forward.”

A noticeable detail of the world of Bounty is the city concept. Instead of revisiting the tall buildings of Blade Runner or Cyberpunk 2077, Pchajek dug into the idea of a city population that is unable to survive on level ground, and must instead use the soil available to them, below the ground.

“The foundational idea of the book was, ‘what is the city that I live in, the city that I love, going to look like in the future, if we continue down the road of the decision making we’re doing?’

“What are those decisions going to manifest into as we move forward into the future? That’s kind of how (Bounty’s) Winnipeg started to take shape.”

The novel is deeply entwined with cyberpunk culture, as cyberpunk culture is just as entwined with climate change — an opportunity that not a lot of people talk about, Pchajek said.

Bounty is available to purchase through McNally Robinson Booksellers, Indigo-Chapters, and other local and online booksellers. Find out more at turnstonepress.com