Cloudthief by Nathaniel Rich
Rebecca Solnit argues that the climate crisis is, in part, a “storytelling crisis,” with a lack of compelling fiction to present paths for action in the face of the looming crisis. Rich, author of one of the best nonfiction books on the history of climate change and the political reaction to it (Losing Earth), has delivered the fictional follow-up we need – subtle yet moving, bizarre yet brilliant. Set in the near future, a rudderless journalist discovers Virginia, an off-grid idealist living in a storage facility. This meeting is the launchpad for an odd-couple heist that presents the evils of Big Data folded into a truly bizarre caper, which gets darker and darker as the tale unfolds.
Cloudthief by Nathaniel Rich, (List Price: $28, MCD, 9780374619794, July 2026)
Reviewed by Doron, Octavia Books in New Orleans, LA
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“I’ve always really been fascinated in maps and the idea of mapping and the impulse to map. I think it is a real human instinct to do it. It actually – as humans, it predates our ability to write. You know, the first known map in the world is an Iron Age map on the walls of a cave in what’s now the Italian Alps in a place called Bedolina. And somebody at some point was filled with the urge to draw, to scratch into the rock this exquisite rendering of their home – their fields and huts and their sort of town, I suppose you would call it. And it’s just such an interesting representation of the urge to say, this is who I am. This is where I am. But of course, you fast-forward a – say, a thousand years or so and you get to the Roman Empire. And from that point on, it’s impossible to disentangle the urge to map from the urge to possess, the – from colonialism.” 
