Introduction
Marisca Pichette’s Every Dark Cloud (2025) represents a significant contribution to contemporary climate fiction, marking the author’s debut in long-form narrative after establishing a reputation through acclaimed short fiction and poetry in venues such as Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. This novella synthesizes the sensory-rich poetics characteristic of Pichette’s earlier work with a sustained dystopian narrative that interrogates humanity’s relationship with environmental catastrophe, technological mediation, and late-stage capitalism. The text merits critical attention not merely as speculative fiction, but as a sophisticated literary exploration of ecological grief, embodied knowledge, and the politics of survival under manufactured darkness. This review argues that Every Dark Cloud achieves its most compelling effects through its radical reconstruction of sensory experience and its refusal of conventional dystopian resolution, even as certain narrative choices occasionally undermine its thematic ambitions.
Plot Summary and Context
Set eighty years after “the Clouding”—a global geoengineering project that shrouded Earth in artificial clouds to prevent solar radiation from rendering the planet uninhabitable—the novella follows Mallory Myco, an architectural designer who creates homes for the perpetually dark world. When Mallory encounters Rein, a severely burned escapee from the machinery maintaining the cloud layer, she learns that the supposedly automated system actually depends on exploited workers laboring in lethal conditions above the clouds. Rein, designated only as worker #774, reveals that the Coalition (ostensibly dissolved decades earlier) continues to operate as the architectural conglomerate BioHomes, extracting labor from populations in unclouded regions to maintain the protective darkness for privileged zones. Following Rein’s crash landing during a coordinated rebellion, Mallory must navigate her complicity in this system while the damaged towers begin failing, threatening to expose her entire region to the same solar devastation that scarred Rein’s body. The narrative culminates in the collapse of both the clouds and the conspiracy, followed by Mallory’s development of a new technology—modified “senselenses”—that protects against radiation without requiring darkness, and her eventual reunion with Rein in “The Clearing,” a renamed era of accountability and sunlight.
Critical Analysis
Themes and Ideas
Pichette’s novella functions primarily as a meditation on what Rob Nixon terms “slow violence”—environmental and structural harms that occur gradually and remain invisible to privileged populations. The Clouding itself serves as a complex metaphor for climate intervention, simultaneously representing salvation and denial. The text interrogates the false binary between apocalypse and survival, suggesting instead that both exist simultaneously in different geographies and bodies. As Rein explains, “Your tower still worked. Using me, the Coalition diverted the last of my tower’s energy to yours.” This revelation reconfigures the entire narrative from individual discovery to systemic critique, positioning environmental protection not as universal good but as resource distribution shaped by power.
The novella’s engagement with disability and embodiment proves particularly sophisticated. Rein’s blindness, burns, and radiation poisoning are not metaphorical but material consequences of environmental racism and labor exploitation. Pichette resists the temptation to “cure” Rein in the narrative’s resolution; they remain scarred and sightless even as their health stabilizes. This choice honors what disability studies scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson calls “the materiality of the body” rather than subordinating embodiment to symbolic function. The text thus participates in what scholar Jina B. Kim identifies as “crip environmentalism,” which recognizes interdependence between environmental justice and disability justice.
The sensory reconfiguration of post-Clouding society deserves sustained attention. Pichette imagines a civilization rebuilt around touch, smell, and sound rather than vision, complete with “senselenses” that diffuse identifying aromas around buildings and bioluminescent organisms that provide navigation. This is not simply world-building ornament but epistemological intervention. By privileging non-visual senses, the text challenges ocularcentrism in Western thought and creates space for alternative ways of knowing. Mallory’s expertise lies in “sculpting darkness,” in designing spaces through tactile and olfactory experience. Yet this reimagined sensorium exists only through violent suppression of other populations’ realities—a critical irony the text pursues relentlessly.
Form and Style
Narratologically, Every Dark Cloud employs close third-person narration focalized through Mallory, a choice that effectively dramatizes her dawning comprehension of systemic violence while creating productive readerly discomfort. We are positioned alongside Mallory in her ignorance, then complicity, then resistance—a trajectory that refuses easy moral clarity. The narrative voice maintains remarkable restraint, favoring sensory description and reported thought over editorial judgment. Consider this passage: “I stare at their twisted skin. As horrible as it is, Rein’s right. There’s nothing more I can do for them.” The flatness of tone here mirrors Mallory’s emotional compartmentalization while the content indicts it.
Pichette’s prose style draws heavily from her background in poetry, particularly in its attention to texture and rhythm. Sentences often build through accumulation rather than subordination: “Mushrooms beneath my feet, soft walls under my fingers. The buildings I make are sculpted to suit the landscape—not in image, so little seen in darkness—but in shape.” This paratactic structure enacts the groping, incremental nature of knowledge acquisition in darkness. The text is rich with synaesthetic imagery, as when bacterial light “swarms around our feet” or water scent becomes thick enough to “drown” in. Such moments demonstrate Pichette’s skill in making the reader feel rather than merely visualize the fictional world.
The novella’s structure deserves scrutiny. The narrative unfolds across several temporal registers: the immediate crisis (roughly two weeks), the trial and tower redesign (one year), and a final leap to reunion and resolution. This compression creates both urgency and occasional narrative strain. The middle section, covering Mallory’s interrogation and the development of new senselens technology, shifts toward summary and exposition in ways that dilute the immediacy of earlier chapters. However, this structural choice may be deliberate, enacting the way trauma and bureaucracy alike attenuate experience.
Characterization
Mallory functions less as fully realized psychological subject than as epistemological vessel—a consciousness through which readers experience the collapse of false knowledge. Her professional identity as designer proves thematically crucial; she literally shapes the world that obscures its own violence. Her creative practice becomes both problem and solution. Initially, Mallory accepts her inability to “afford [her] own designs” as natural, a market reality. Her radicalization involves recognizing this acceptance as ideological capture. Yet Pichette largely avoids interiority regarding Mallory’s political awakening, keeping her motivation somewhat opaque. We understand that she commits to protecting Rein but rarely access the why beyond surface-level explanations about “guilt” and “pity.”
Rein emerges as the novella’s most compelling creation precisely through their partial inaccessibility. Sightless, scarred, and often inarticulate through pain, Rein resists objectification even as the narrative risks objectifying them through Mallory’s gaze. Their bioluminescent teeth—the most haunting image in the text—literalize the novel’s concern with visibility and witnessing. They cannot help but illuminate, even as they lack eyes to see. Rein’s characterization relies heavily on reported speech and physical description, creating productive distance. They remain, necessarily, somewhat unknowable to Mallory and thus to readers. This narrative choice respects rather than appropriates trauma while dramatizing the limits of cross-positional understanding.
The romance between Mallory and Rein develops with admirable restraint. Physical intimacy emerges through Mallory’s medical care of Rein’s wounds—an inversion of conventional romance that centers vulnerability and dependency. The reunion scene that closes the novella risks sentimentality but earns its emotional stakes through the year of separation and systemic violence that precedes it. When Mallory says, “I thought you died,” the line carries genuine weight because the text has demonstrated the material reality of that possibility.
Historical and Theoretical Contexts
Every Dark Cloud participates in several intersecting literary and critical conversations. Within climate fiction (cli-fi), it joins works like Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future and Omar El Akkad’s American War in imagining climate response rather than merely climate catastrophe. However, where Robinson emphasizes technocratic solutions and El Akkad focuses on inter-regional conflict, Pichette foregrounds labor exploitation and environmental racism. The novella’s closest literary antecedent may be Octavia Butler’s Parable series, which similarly examines how climate collapse intensifies existing hierarchies while imagining communities of mutual aid in hostile conditions.
The text engages explicitly with geoengineering debates, particularly solar radiation management (SRM) proposals like stratospheric aerosol injection. By making the Clouding simultaneously successful and catastrophic, Pichette dramatizes what environmental humanities scholars call “salvation narratives”—the dangerous belief that technological intervention can resolve political and economic contradictions. The novella suggests that any climate solution that preserves existing power relations will reproduce violence in new forms.
From a Marxist perspective, the revelation that BioHomes is the Coalition represents a critique of what Naomi Klein terms “disaster capitalism”—the process by which crises enable private accumulation. The towers that “save” humanity also create new markets (architectural design for darkness, senselens production) and new labor regimes (tower maintenance). Mallory’s architectural work appears apolitical, even benevolent, but depends entirely on Rein’s exploitation. This structural analysis aligns the novella with recent Marxist cli-fi criticism that emphasizes capitalism as root cause rather than incidental feature of climate catastrophe.
The text also warrants reading through sensory studies and phenomenology. By imagining a world restructured around non-visual senses, Pichette participates in what Constance Classen calls “the cultural history of the senses,” which examines how sensory hierarchies reflect and reproduce social hierarchies. The privileging of vision in Western modernity connects to Enlightenment rationality, colonial ordering of space, and surveillance. Mallory’s world initially seems to escape this through its emphasis on smell and touch, but the novella reveals that this alternative sensorium requires its own forms of violence to maintain.
Evaluation
Every Dark Cloud succeeds most powerfully in its sensory imagination and its refusal of easy resolution. Pichette has created a genuinely alien-feeling world whose estrangement serves critical rather than merely decorative purposes. The prose consistently achieves what it attempts, balancing lyricism with narrative clarity. The central conceit—that environmental protection for some requires environmental devastation for others—lands with appropriate force, and the text resists recuperating this violence through individual heroism.
The novella’s weaknesses emerge primarily in pacing and political specificity. The middle section covering the trial and tower reconstruction feels rushed relative to the careful attention paid to Mallory’s initial encounters with Rein. This compression means we receive little detail about the rebellion’s broader scope, the fate of other survivors, or the political transformation of the United Governments. The trial itself occurs largely offstage, told through summary rather than scene. While this narrative distance may reflect Mallory’s alienation from justice processes, it also forecloses opportunities for examining how systems absorb and neutralize challenges to their legitimacy.
More significantly, the novella’s conclusion risks implying that technological innovation can resolve fundamentally political problems. Mallory’s modified senselenses provide protection without darkness, seemingly eliminating the zero-sum resource conflict that drove the narrative. While Pichette is too sophisticated to present this as unambiguous triumph—the corporate and state structures remain intact, Mallory lives under permanent witness protection, the seventy-four indicted conspirators disappear to unknown fates—the fact that a technical fix exists at all potentially undermines the text’s structural critique. A bleaker but perhaps more rigorous ending might have Mallory developing the technology while recognizing its insufficiency, or even completing it only to see it appropriated by the same forces she opposed.
That said, the reunion of Mallory and Rein in sunlight carries genuine power precisely because the text has earned it through accumulated loss. The image of Rein “smelling like sunlight” rather than sickness transforms the sun from threat to possibility without erasing its dangers or Rein’s scars. This ambivalent ending suits a novella that consistently refuses binary thinking.
In terms of originality, Every Dark Cloud distinguishes itself within cli-fi through its sustained attention to sensory experience and labor relations. Few speculative texts so thoroughly reimagine daily life in an altered climate, and fewer still center the workers maintaining environmental systems rather than the elites or refugees typically featured in the genre. The novella’s queer sensibility—understated but unmistakable in Mallory and Rein’s relationship and Pichette’s consistent use of they/them pronouns—also sets it apart in a subgenre that remains surprisingly heteronormative.
Conclusion
Marisca Pichette’s Every Dark Cloud represents a significant achievement in contemporary climate fiction, one that synthesizes sensory innovation, political critique, and genuine literary craft. By forcing readers to navigate a world of manufactured darkness and then revealing the exploited labor that maintains it, Pichette dramatizes how privilege obscures the conditions of its own possibility. The novella’s greatest strength lies in its refusal of false salvation: even as Mallory develops technology to mitigate the crisis, the text insists on acknowledging what cannot be fixed or undone. Rein’s scarred body remains scarred; the dead remain dead; the structural violence that enabled the Clouding persists in new forms.
The text merits continued scholarly attention not merely as genre fiction but as literary art grappling seriously with the aesthetic and political challenges of representing climate catastrophe. Future criticism might productively examine the novella’s queer ecological imagination in greater depth, trace its relationship to disability poetics, or situate it within longer traditions of speculative labor fiction. As climate crisis intensifies and geoengineering proposals gain institutional support, Every Dark Cloud offers a crucial reminder that technological interventions always distribute benefits and harms unevenly. The question, as Pichette demonstrates, is never whether we can survive but rather who survives, how, and at whose expense.
In an era when “solving” climate change threatens to become another frontier for capital accumulation and imperial violence, Pichette’s insistence that “we know what must be done to stop the fire, [but] we are afraid” demands that we examine our fear. The time for acknowledgment has indeed passed. Whether we can work collectively rather than reproducing violence under new names—that question remains, troublingly, unresolved. Every Dark Cloud does not answer it. Instead, with admirable rigor and considerable beauty, it helps us ask it better.