Blue Skies was published by Ecco in 2023. The Cullen family is scattered across a collapsing American landscape: Cat, the older daughter, lives in Florida and keeps a Burmese python as a pet (one of the invasive species devouring the Everglades); Cooper, the son, loses his legs to a tick-borne infection in drought-ravaged California; the mother watches her beachfront property slowly disappear underwater. Meanwhile, everyone continues to act as though everything is fine — buying property in flood zones, denying what they can see with their own eyes.
The novel is Boyle’s most explicitly about climate change as a lived, present-tense experience (as opposed to A Friend of the Earth’s speculative future). The comedy is bleaker: not the exuberant farce of his earlier work but the gallows humor of people who know the world is ending and cannot stop living their lives.
Boyle’s Climate Arc
Blue Skies completes a twenty-three-year arc that began with A Friend of the Earth (2000). Where the earlier novel imagined climate catastrophe from a distance, Blue Skies renders it as lived experience — the flooding, the invasive species, the disease vectors, the denial. Boyle’s climate fiction is unique in American literature: no other major novelist has returned to the subject with such consistency and increasing urgency.
Collecting Blue Skies
First edition (Ecco, New York, 2023): Boards with dust jacket.
Approximate market values:
- Fine in dust jacket: $15–$30
- Very good: $8–$15
Projected values (2026–2036): Modest appreciation. As Boyle’s most recent novel and a bookend to A Friend of the Earth, it has particular significance for collectors of the climate fiction subgenre.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does Blue Skies compare to A Friend of the Earth? A Friend of the Earth (2000) imagined climate disaster as a speculative future; Blue Skies (2023) renders it as present-tense lived experience. Together they form a twenty-three-year arc tracking Boyle’s engagement with environmental catastrophe.
Are Burmese pythons really invading Florida? Yes. An estimated population of 100,000+ Burmese pythons has established itself in the Everglades, devastating native wildlife. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission runs an annual Python Challenge to control the population.