Gabrielle Korn’s first ebook Everybody (Else) is Good, a memoir about—amongst different issues—the writer’s rise from Autostraddle columnist to the youngest-ever editor-in-chief of Nylon Media, got here out three years in the past in the course of the top of the pandemic, a notoriously tough time for debut authors. Now, she’s watching her first novel Yours for the Taking, a piece of dystopian fiction a few queer couple dwelling in climate-ravaged Brooklyn in 2050, make its approach right into a somewhat-healed however more and more fractured world.

At first look, Korn’s memoir and her debut novel could not appear to share a lot DNA, however there’s a connecting thread of what one would possibly name “apocalyptical girlbossery” connecting the 2. Korn needed to put up with loads of it whereas working in ladies’s media, and in Yours for the Taking, it’s shrewdly offered as a pretend technique of salvation that solely actually exists to drive ladies additional into competitors with one another (whilst they attempt to discover their approach into a brand new, climate-change-proof secret society known as “The Inside Undertaking”…pay attention, simply learn the ebook). Lately, Vogue spoke to Korn about civil rights amid local weather catastrophe, choosing and selecting dystopias, and dream-casting.

Vogue: How does it really feel to shift from memoir to dystopian fiction?

Effectively, it’s humorous as a result of in a whole lot of methods, a whole lot of the themes of my memoir do pop up within the dystopian fiction as a result of, you recognize, media is turning into extra dystopian by the day. However I additionally really feel like writing fiction is simply much more weak; it’s what I’ve all the time wished to do, and subsequently it appears like there’s much more self-imposed stress round it. While you write a memoir, the method is all of the issues which have occurred to you and placing collectively an attention-grabbing narrative based mostly on fact. And fiction is rather like, you actually make it up from the darkest corners of your mind. So I believe, weirdly, it does really feel extra intimate to me.

In the event you needed to reside in a speculative-fiction-style dystopia, which might you select?

Assuming that we’re not already dwelling in a single?

Ha, sure.

I may need to get again to you on that. I’d be horrible in a dystopia, to be sincere; I’ve no survival abilities. Each time I watch a zombie film, I’m identical to, I’d ask to be bitten first, as a result of I actually shouldn’t have what it takes to reside a life on the run.