God and Sex: Jon Raymond's new climate fiction novel
This week's episode of the Reversing Climate Change podcast is about climate fiction and screenwriting with the author of the new cli-fi novel, God and Sex.
🔹 Quick Takeaways
Realism meets climate fiction: Jon Raymond brings climate themes into grounded, interpersonal storytelling rather than speculative or high-concept narratives.
Small stories, big issues: In novels like Denial and God and Sex, Raymond explores climate change through individual moral crises, legal ambiguity, and subtle existential dread.
Denial as climate noir: A journalist tracks a fugitive oil executive in a post-Green New Deal future. Think Nazi hunter meets eco-drama—with a chilling ambiguity about guilt, justice, and charm.
Miracles and uncertainty: In God and Sex, a possible miracle in the middle of a love triangle becomes a meditation on faith, memory, and doubt.
Apophatic theology: Raymond aligns more with traditions that emphasize divine unknowability rather than confident spiritual revelation, reflecting the uncertainty at the core of climate reality.
Critique of culture: He challenges the dominance of post-apocalyptic fiction and simplistic portrayals of emotional immaturity in popular media.
Upcoming projects: Collaborating again with Todd Haynes and Kate Winslet on an adaptation of Hernan Diaz’s Trust. A Denial film is also in slow but active development.
📝 Jon Raymond’s Climate Fiction Doesn’t Scream — It Sits Quietly With You
In this episode, Ross Kenyon interviews novelist and screenwriter Jon Raymond, whose quiet and deeply human stories ask us to reconsider how climate change, spirituality, and morality function in art.
Raymond is best known for co-writing several meditative films with Kelly Reichardt, and though his books don’t always mimic the same minimalist style, they carry a similar emotional weight. As he puts it, novels demand a “bigger engine,” but his commitment to realism—to characters with flaws, wisdom, and restraint—remains constant.
✍️ A “Climate Novelist” Without the Banner
Ross notes early on that Raymond’s writing doesn’t scream “climate fiction,” even though Denial, God and Sex, and even his early work (The Half-Life) incorporate environmental devastation and politics.
Raymond explains that for him, climate isn’t a genre: it’s part of the everyday emotional landscape. Whether writing about early beaver trade or future carbon trials, he’s not crafting dystopias. He’s telling human stories where the climate crisis is simply part of the air people breathe.
This positions him in sharp contrast with someone like Kim Stanley Robinson, whose The Ministry for the Future is global in scale and research-intensive. Raymond is candid: he doesn’t try to compete. He zooms in instead, often borrowing from other genre conventions to explore the morality of culpability and complicity.
🧨 Denial: Crime, Climate, and the Ambiguity of Justice
Set in a world where a global Green New Deal has already happened, Denial follows a journalist who discovers a former oil executive hiding in Mexico, someone who was powerful, charming, and guilty.
The book draws clear parallels to Nazi hunting, but its genius lies in its ambiguity: What should justice look like decades later? Is charm a kind of moral camouflage? Can someone be personally likable and institutionally monstrous?
Raymond was clear that his executive had to face consequences, even if the protagonist, and the reader, might feel conflicted. That complexity, he argues, is where literature thrives, especially in contrast to simplified media narratives that feed us clear villains and heroes.
As Ross points out, Denial also subtly explores meat, disease, and prion illness: a smart, non-obvious way of tying climate to public health and personal behavior.
✝️ God and Sex: Miracles, Doubt, and Apophatic Theology
In Raymond’s newest novel, God and Sex, the story unfolds around an ambiguous miracle in the middle of a love triangle — set against a backdrop of climate disaster.
The novel explores a theological space rarely tackled in climate fiction: apophatic thought, the idea that God (or truth) is fundamentally unknowable and best defined by what it is not. This makes the book less about divine certainty and more about doubt, absence, and interpretation.
The central question isn’t whether a miracle happened, but how people live in the uncertain aftermath of something they can’t explain. This mirrors how many people feel after psychedelic experiences or brushes with the sublime: Did that really happen? Was it real? Or just brain chemistry?
Raymond contrasts this apophatic stance with the sunny confidence of New Age thinking, something he encountered via his Buddhist-Sufi father. The novel’s emotional tension may come from reconciling that worldview with his Jewish mother’s more legalistic Old Testament take on divinity.
🎭 Betrayal, Empathy, and Emotional Realism
A recurring theme in both novels is betrayal; not always dramatic, but often quiet and ethically complicated. Raymond talks about how emotionally immature portrayals of people in pop culture don’t reflect the wisdom he sees in real life.
His characters often show restraint. In God and Sex, for instance, when a husband learns of an affair, he doesn’t explode. He understands. And that, ironically, makes the betrayal feel even more human and painful.
That maturity — what Raymond and Ross both call wisdom, feels like a challenge to writers who mistake intensity for truth. “There’s no shortage of drama in life,” Raymond says. “You don’t have to put steroids in it.”
🎬 What’s Next?
A new novel is underway: smaller in scope, centered on a girl’s soccer coach, aiming for realism without high-stakes narrative “hamburgers.”
Collaborating with Todd Haynes and Kate Winslet again on Trust, a TV adaptation of Hernan Diaz’s Pulitzer-winning novel.
Denial is in development (but not in “hell,”) Raymond insists — just slowly moving forward.
And yes, Ross may or may not get a producer credit if Stanley Tucci lands the lead.
🌱 Final Reflection: Climate Is the Atmosphere, Not the Plot
Raymond’s stories don’t preach or pose as climate manifestos. Instead, climate is the condition, not the character. It shapes behavior, morality, doubt, and justice in ways that feel hauntingly real — not heroic, not catastrophic. Just human.