Helen Simpson on Our Timeline on This Planet

This week’s story, “Lub Dub Lub Dub Lub Dub,” opens as two old friends, Tracey and Lois, meet for coffee in London on a hot May day. (“The air was already at blood heat outside,” you write.) They’re discussing Tracey’s new cooker and how much she dislikes using an electric stovetop. Did you always know that a conversation about stovetops would be the way into the story?Absolutely not! I knew what I wanted to write about, but I had to wait for that surprise cooker nugget before I could get going. Climate change is such awkward, intractable subject matter. Statistics or moralizing or showing a polar bear in trouble won’t do, and the usual dystopian story is way too comfortable, as it dodges the present moment. Here, I had the ideal cover: two older women chatting about their cookers.The stor