Drinking Coke in the Desert: Human Patterns in a Parched Future

Claire Vaye Watkins’s Gold Fame Citrus is a haunting portrait of a world long past saving. The American West has dried into a vast dune sea, cities are abandoned, and the remnants of humanity cling to survival amid scarcity and delusion. Yet Watkins doesn’t write a dystopia about systems collapsing—she writes about people persisting. Her focus isn’t on the mechanics of climate change, what happened and when, but on the human tendencies that endure in spite of it. In the ruins, her characters love, betray, and dream in familiar patterns. Even as the landscape turns alien, the human behaviors shown are familiar in both hopeful positive and despairingly negative ways, just as people have always done.

Luz and Ray, the novel’s central pair, are modern Adam and Eve figures—adrift, improvising their way through apocalypse. Their decision to care for an abandoned child doesn’t transform them into saviors, but deepens their entanglement in old myths of hope and belonging. The climate backdrop feels immense and indifferent to the people living within in it. Watkins suggests that while the planet’s systems can change beyond recognition, the small dramas of human desire—our need for connection, control, and meaning—stay constant.

A World Without Water

One of the most striking aspects of Gold Fame Citrus is its depiction of total water loss. California’s aquifers have collapsed, reservoirs are dry, and the concept of rainfall feels almost mythical. Water has become currency, religion, and memory. Watkins uses this absence not only as environmental horror but as psychological erosion—the drought seeps into people’s identities.

Among the most darkly ironic symbols of this scarcity are the Coke rations that Luz and Ray drink for hydration. In a world where natural water has vanished, the only liquids left are relics of consumer culture—syrupy, artificial, and unsustainable. Coke becomes a ghost of the old world, the residue of capitalism outlasting the ecosystem that made it possible. It’s sweet, empty, and corrosive—an echo of humanity’s misplaced priorities. That this is what survives after the fall feels almost inevitable; even at the end of the world, we’re still drinking the brand, not the water.

Reflections in Other Climate Worlds

This tension between environmental transformation and emotional familiarity is what distinguishes Gold Fame Citrus from other climate narratives we have read like Lily Brooks-Dalton’s The Light Pirate and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower.

In The Light Pirate, Florida’s coast is vanishing beneath relentless hurricanes and rising seas, but Brooks-Dalton frames this not only as collapse, but as evolution. Her protagonist, Wanda, grows into a being attuned to the planet’s new rhythms, embodying a form of adaptation that feels almost spiritual. While Watkins’s desert resists life, Brooks-Dalton’s world offers a strange rebirth—a merging of human and natural resilience. By contrast, Butler’s Parable of the Sower sees apocalypse as social prophecy. Her America burns not from drought alone but from moral and political decay. Yet her protagonist, Lauren, crafts a new belief system—Earthseed—that reframes survival as change. Butler’s vision is collective and visionary, driven by the belief that humanity can adapt its values as the Earth transforms.

Placed beside these, Gold Fame Citrus feels more fatalistic. Watkins isn’t interested in rebuilding or transcending; she writes about what’s left when people can’t—or won’t—evolve. Her characters are caught in the gravitational pull of old myths (and the traps that come with them), while Butler and Brooks-Dalton allow their characters to reach for new ones.

Still, all three novels share a crucial understanding: climate change doesn’t erase human nature—it reveals it. Whether through despair, faith, or metamorphosis, people respond to catastrophe the only way they know how—by trying to make meaning in the ruins. Watkins’s desert, Brooks-Dalton’s drowned coast, and Butler’s burning streets all remind us that even as the world transforms, the patterns of human longing and survival remain achingly familiar.

Imagining Ourselves in Their World

By setting human stories against the backdrop of ecological collapse, Watkins, Brooks-Dalton, and Butler give readers a way to test themselves against the future. They ask not only what will happen when the water runs out or the storms don’t stop—but who will we become? These stories turn distant climate data into lived experience, helping us practice empathy, resilience, and moral clarity before the crisis arrives. They remind us that climate change isn’t just a scientific or political problem—it’s a human one. And by seeing how Luz, Wanda, and Lauren navigate their fractured worlds, we can begin to picture how we might face our own.