Many writers say they write because they can't help it, they have so many stories inside them that need to get out. Perhaps to some degree that's how it is for me too. But mostly I write to make sense of life.

In building worlds, I'm forced to zero in on details I might absorb without consciously acknowledging. I'm forced to contextualise and analyse characters' experiences to tell coherent stories. Writing is a way to make sensible shapes from an otherwise murky brain soup.

Yet We Sleep, We Dream is something of a redemption project for my sixteen year old self, a first-generation Southeast Asian migrant to Perth who just couldn't get her head around William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, even after digesting a live performance and a school term's worth of class notes.

Yes, this blasted play has vexed me for over two decades, but studying it now through the lens of a writer... I get it, I think. It's not just about high-as-fuck twenty-somethings (or were they supposed to be teenagers?) running around in the forest. It's about love and the irrational things it makes us do. It's about having no choice but to yield to such inexplicable forces of nature, because creatures susceptible to love are immaculately and beautifully flawed.

But this project was more than just a way to thank my English teachers for being so patient. It was also, in a small way, a kind of wish fulfillment.

According to the Bureau of Meteorology, Australia's climate has warmed by an average of 1.4°C since national records began in 1910. We've seen increases in sea surface temperatures, more frequent extreme heat events, reduced wet season rainfall in the southern regions, increased rainfall in the northern regions, rising sea levels, and increased ocean acidity, more extreme fire weather and longer fire seasons, and decreased snow in the country's alpine regions.

That's a lot to take in. And it's only going to intensify if we do nothing to reduce our emissions. Of course, government and industries are sort of doing something now, but there's always the question of whether it'll be enough and in time. And what we lose if there's a shortfall. Thinking about this is alarming and depressing.

One of my favourite authors once called science fiction an ultimately optimistic genre because it imagines we have a future. It might not be a great future, but it's still a future... Though I'm starting to wonder if I imagined this, because I can't find a source for that quote.

But anyway, imagining a future helps. In the case of this book, even though it's a fictional and obviously fantasy future, it helps.

I picture University students on a summer excursion in deep space, studying a dead planet that never survived its Anthropocene. But in the dust and ashes of that once-great civilisation, the students find hope for their own warming world. I don't know if I believe in magic or gods that engage in idle banter with pitiful humans, but I do love the idea of finding hope and happy endings.

Yet We Sleep, We Dream is a romantic space fantasy, launching 23 Sep 2023.