Welcome to Nivaria

Welcome to Nivaria.

This is Caitlyn Meeks. Thanks for being here.

Before we go any further, I'd like to tell you, briefly, what this is.

Nivaria is a serial novel in audio. It's set on Tenerife ~~ the largest of the Canary Islands, a volcano off the coast of Africa. The current date in the story is the spring of 2041. The world has been mostly quiet for twelve years. The flights stopped landing, the cargo ships stopped coming, and the internet stopped working, in that order. Some people left the island while they could. Some people chose to stay. This is a story about the ones who stayed.

It is not a story about global or social collapse. It is a story about a girl who was born into one and grew up finding it completely normal.

The girl's name is Saga. She lives in the Laurisilva cloud forest, high up the volcano. She's thirteen and a half and has never seen a working smartphone. Her father plays joyful music on old, salvaged synthesizers. Her mother grows the only coffee on the island. Her dog is named after the brightest fixed star in the night sky, and takes the assignment seriously. Saga and her family sometimes travel with a company of jugglers, actors, musicians, tarot readers and a Hungarian ringleader all piled into a 1978 Land Rover that runs on banana bio-diesel. The story is what happens as they circumnavigate the island in a series of small encounters that add up.

Sometimes we'll go back in time. Sometimes we'll visit people Saga has never met. Sometimes we'll be in the head of a Spanish astrophysicist who refused to leave her observatory; sometimes in the head of an indie game designer from Munich who came for three weeks in 2027, didn't quite manage to leave, and now spray-paints her cartoon-squirrel detective character on the walls of every derelict resort she can find; sometimes in the head of a Belgian land developer who is, in 2041, still updating his projections for when the resort economy will resume. The show is shaped like a serial. Every episode kind works on its own. If you stick with me for a year, you'll see something that wouldn't fit in any single chapter.

Two practical things, while we're getting our bearings.

The characters on this island sometimes speak a language called La Charla-- spanish for chatting. It grew up here on its own, after the world went quiet, when the people who stayed ~~ Spanish, Swedish, Hungarian, German, Flemish, everyone ~~ needed a way to make themselves understood at the same kitchen table. Simplified Spanish is at the heart and there's words borrowed from whoever showed up with them. You don't need to study it. But there's a little glossary in the description of each episode if you want it. If you don't, I kinda translate the words as we go along.

I'm an expat writer. I live somewhere in the cloud forest. I won't tell you where ~~ I like the quiet too much to give it up.

Welcome to Nivaria.

I'll see you in the cloud forest.