Though climate change and governmental mismanagement have been hot-button issues for years, Los Angeles-based author Gabrielle Korn couldn’t have predicted that her latest novel, “The Shutouts,” which explores a future where climate change has been all but ignored, would be published just weeks before she and her wife would be packing up their things and relocating due to some of the largest, deadliest and most destructive wildfires in Southern California history.

“We live in an area that, thankfully, was not on fire, but because of where we are in relation to the fires, we have some of the worst air quality, so we relocated to the desert,” Korn said during a recent phone interview. “It just felt like the time to leave is when you feel like leaving, and I feel fortunate that we were able to.”

The parallels between what unfolds in this novel and what’s playing out in real time are purely coincidental, but some of the government mandates in 2041 and 2078 in the book really don’t seem that far off. Constructing huge, city-size domes to protect “select” citizens from rapid-spreading wildfires, destructive hurricanes and flash floods instead of heeding the advice of scientists and environmental experts sounds eerily familiar.

And while in the novel the haves shut out the have-nots, Korn said she has seen a glimmer of hope between the book and what’s happening in communities throughout Los Angeles County as people clean up, gather donations, volunteer their time and help their neighbors in the wake of the wildfires.

“The point of writing the book was to show these separate characters coming together and showing that we can’t survive without each other,” she said. “In fact, really beautiful and amazing things happen when we acknowledge that.”

Finding her voice

“The Shutouts” is an unofficial sequel to Korn’s 2023 novel, “Yours for the Taking,” and is told through a series of letters written by a survivalist, Kelly, who composes messages about her experiences to her daughter. Through Kelly, these chapters and the characters begin to connect with one another despite being in different places and facing disparate challenges.

“I loved writing Kelly’s chapters,” Korn said. “Something hallucinogenic happened when I was writing her and it felt like transcribing — like she was just telling me her story and I was writing it down. As an author, that’s what you hope will happen, but it doesn’t always. And I feel like she was a complicated character. She’s not a reliable narrator of her own life and you can’t really trust what she’s saying, but she’s likable so you want to. I loved that about her.”

Korn said the idea to reveal Kelly via a series of letters throughout the book came to her when writing in the third person just wasn’t working.

“It didn’t feel powerful enough and I spend a lot of time thinking about the narration of fiction and who is the narrator, who is this all-knowing voice telling us about these characters,” she said. “It made sense for that to be Kelly and to have her telling her own story, because just the act of her writing the letters becomes part of the plot.”

An inclusive imagination

Most of the characters in “The Shutouts” are queer. It’s intentional, Korn said, since that’s how she sees it in her imagination.

“It’s important to me because I feel there aren’t enough queer people in science fiction,” she said. “The big-budget disaster movies are one of my favorite things to consume, but there are never any gay people in those.”

With so many clusters of characters and complicated relationships, whether they’re mother-daughter relationships or romantic entanglements, “The Shutouts” flows easily, courtesy of being broken up by Kelly’s letters, and the anticipation builds as the light bulb moments hit and these clusters begin to intertwine.

“I’m an outliner, so with a book that has this many characters and plots and subplots, you have to lay it all out,” Korn said. “What’s challenging is the temptation to reveal the connections right away. So, that’s why editors are great, to have someone else point out that part of the satisfaction of reading a novel is the delayed gratification of how everyone comes together.”

With her third novel, Korn said, she realized that writing didn’t have to be a solo venture. In the past, she has shut herself off and written in solitude. “The Shutouts” was more of a collaborative effort, and the novel is better for it, she said.

“I had a writing group for the first time and I think it’s a much stronger book,” she said. “I had this idea about writing that you couldn’t show it to anybody until you had a draft, and you couldn’t talk about it to anyone. I felt weirdly superstitious and secretive about it, and I don’t think the other books were better for that. With ‘The Shutouts,’ I had author friends reading it as I went along, so we were talking through it constantly and I think it shaped the book in ways I can’t even quantify.”

There were a couple of instances where the group came in clutch, Korn recalls.

“Someone in the group pointed out that the group of young activists would not have been monogamous,” she said with a laugh. “That was hugely helpful and changed the plot some. Then someone pointed out that I had incorrectly described the way to skin and eat a squirrel. So, you learn a lot about what people know.”

Take a walk

While she doesn’t set specific rules for herself when she’s in the process of working on a project, Korn realized that the mind and body connection is imperative, and she doesn’t force herself to write something for the sake of putting down words.

“I write when I have something to write, and otherwise I am reading and going on hikes,” she said. “I’ve found through the process of writing ‘The Shutouts’ — and obviously I’m not the first person to think of this — but I can think better if I’ve gone on a long walk, exercised or I eat before I sit down to do anything. You have to take care of your body in order to think. Have snacks, get fresh air and remember you’re not just a skin sack with a brain in it — you’re more than that.”

While she’d be content with “Yours for the Taking” and “The Shutouts” remaining a duology, Korn said she wouldn’t rule out writing another book with these characters. And in a dream world, she imagines her books getting turned into one of those big-budget, disaster-style movies she loves so much, or at least a TV miniseries where Kelly could be played by someone like “Amy Adams or another iconic redhead,” she said.