What Does Europe Look Like at 5°C of Global Warming?

The CHOW Interview: Indie author Claudia Befu joins The CHOW to discuss her new mosaic novel There Is Hope, writing in images, and why fiction brings abstract science to life.

Life provides its own entertainment, and I try to capture the conflict and joy that arise from our everyday experiences. My stories offer a brief respite from this crazy life, and I hope you enjoy them. There’s something new every Friday.

Pull up a spot. Subscribers receive special access to exclusive content, including new stories, a guide to the “Space Between” the novels, soundtracks, and more... ​

[VW] Welcome to another edition of The CHOW (Creative Hero on Writing), where I interview indie authors to understand their origin story, their “Why,” and a little bit about their process and work. For more CHOW Interviews, click here:

Claudia Befu was born in Romania under communism. She dreamed of forest cities with capsule homes from the age of six, and became a prize-winning poet and playwright with an MA in screenwriting. From April 2023 to September 2025, she serialized a climate-fiction mosaic novel, There Is Hope, on her Substack, Story Voyager. Last week, she released There Is Hope as an eBook, available for purchase online. Claudia. welcome.

[CB] Thank you for having me, Vince. I love the acronym of the interview series, The Chow, it sounds like a Chinese dish.

[VW] Thank you. It’s a fun way to chew on the insights of authors like yourself. In many of your online bios, you like to mention that you were born at “340 ppm.” Why is that number significant to you?

[CB] It’s actually something I lifted from Greta Thunberg’s Twitter bio, and it stands for the atmospheric CO2 concentration in parts per million in the year in which I was born. I noticed that at the beginning of June, the first two digits have switched, and we reached 430 ppm.

[VW] Tell us a little bit about your origin. You grew up in communist Romania, which fell when you were seven or eight years old in 1989. What do you remember of your early childhood, and what was creative expression like for you during that time?

[CB] There are so many memories from a world that doesn’t exist anymore. I was born in 1981, and that year the dictator switched to a more extreme form of dictatorship after the North Korean style. I remember the monthly ration cards. One for bread, we were a family of four, and we got two loaves of bread per day. One for monthly rations of oil, sugar, flour, and rice. I think we got half a kilogram of sugar per month. My mother was waking up at five in the morning to queue for milk and kefir. We had to recycle everything, from glass bottles to paper. The school organized recycling initiatives to teach children to be mindful with resources. My parents refused to join the party and were stuck in factory jobs, since you couldn’t get promoted without a membership carnet. I remember my dad recording cassettes and painting in his free time. When I was small, my parents talked a lot about the dictator. And one day, when I was about five, I remember sitting in the tiny kitchen of our communist apartment located on the ground floor. It was summer, and the kitchen window was open, and we lived on a very quiet alley. Suddenly, I asked my mom: Who is this Ceausescu you’re always talking about? I’ll never forget this moment for the rest of my life. My mother shot the window closed and came close to my face and stared me in the eyes: Never, ever ask this question again, do you understand? You’re going to put us in jail! Three and a half years later, the Iron Curtain fell.

[VW] While we all fall in love with the vast beauty of nature, when did the environment become a passion for you?

[CB] I have always felt a kinship with nature. In front of the apartment building where I grew up, there were two old linden trees that I loved as a child. One morning, the summer after I turned four years old, I woke up to the sound of chainsaws. When I looked outside the window, I saw a couple of men cutting down the trees. I cried the whole day. I still consider every living being to be a citizen of this planet with the same rights as we humans have to live a life in dignity. In 2016, I took a few courses in landscape architecture at the University of Life Sciences in Vienna, where I learned more about our relationship with the natural world, and I think that this is where a seed has been planted. One eye-opening thing I learned was that the way we build our surroundings is based on a blueprint, on someone’s idea of how we should live and interact with the world. For example, the American car-centric city was envisioned in 1939 by a designer who thought people won’t walk anymore in the future but use private vehicles to commute. There were other designers who had different visions, such as garden cities, but the motorized city idea happened to be more captivating at that time. Imagine if we lived in a world of garden cities. Wouldn’t we appreciate and respect our environment much more?

[VW] How does this passion inform your writing? What message do you like to convey to the world?

[CB] I do two things with my writing. One, I try to identify the blueprints that inform the way we humans live on this planet in relation to the natural world and explore the futures to which these blueprints could lead us. For example, in my novel There Is Hope, I explore Europe in the year 2550, four and a half centuries after we’ve reached 5°C of global warming by the end of the twenty-first century. And two, I try to plant a seed: what other blueprints are out there to explore? Can we find a blueprint where all life on Earth flourishes? Where we don’t see the natural world and, increasingly, human beings as resources to be extracted and exploited? But as something precious and worth protecting? Or even better, acknowledge every living being’s right to exist?

[VW] You serialized your first novel, There is Hope, on Substack in 2023. What brought you to the platform, and why did you decide to publish it here, rather than publishing traditionally or self-publishing?

[CB] During COVID, I started running a tea Instagram page, and one of the tea people I was following started a Substack account where she wrote short stories. I subscribed to her newsletter, but at some point, she decided to step away from the platform. Through her account, I discovered Elle Griffin, and she inspired me to start serializing my own novel here. In September 2022, I opened an account, and in April 2023, I sent out the first installment of my mosaic novel. The reason I decided to write and serialize my novel on this platform was simple: I needed accountability. In 2013, I had an idea for a sci-fi story, but a decade and a screenwriting degree later, I still didn’t have a novel. I did write my sci-fi story as a screenplay for a feature film during my studies, but I wasn’t under any illusion that it would be turned into a movie. My goal has always been to write books. But before I could think about self-publishing or getting traditionally published, I had to do one thing: write a book. So this is what I did.

[VW] Tell us a little bit about There is Hope and why this story needed to be told.

[CB] I actually started writing There Is Hope in 2019 during my screenwriting studies. We had an assignment to write a screenplay for a short film, and I came up with The Seed Grower, a side story in the fiction universe I had started building in 2013. One year later, I had a dream about a human sacrifice to feed the last sharks and decided to turn that into a story in the same world. And while I was at it, I thought, why not write a collection of interconnected short stories exploring the origins of my main sci-fi story idea? This is how There Is Hope was born, a mosaic climate fiction novel that explores Europe in the year 2550, four and a half centuries after we’ve reached 5°C of global warming by the end of the twenty-first century. The novel is structured as a curated collection of human memories stored in the Museum of Life in the year 3660. Imagine a virtual museum where you can experience history through an immersive, multisensory collection of stories based on the preserved memories of those who actually lived through those historical times. I wanted to depict the suffering of a world almost devoid of nature, where every single non-human life is more precious than any human life or technology. This is not only a speculative future, it is a future that I took great pains to research and depict as realistically as possible. I want to believe that it paints a pretty good picture of what we stand to lose if we can’t and won’t curb global warming in the next seventy-five years. The novel doesn’t follow the story of a single hero on purpose. The future requires every single one of us to care enough to take action.

[VW] And now it will soon be in print. Are you excited about having your writing in tangible form? And I always enjoy Baris Sheri’s covers.

[CB] Yes, the book is not available as an eBook and will soon be available also in print. I am new to indie publishing, and it takes some time to figure everything out. I was very lucky to find Baris via other writers here on Substack. He is a professional book designer, and his work ethic, the seriousness and professionalism he puts into his work, have guided me through the long months of editing it took to prepare the book for print. I am very happy with how the book came out and can’t wait to hold the hardcopy in my hands soon.

[VW] Your passion for the environment is clearly a “Why” for writing, but why fictional narratives? And how does this “why” fuel your writing?

[CB] I love storytelling, I love stories, I love the human imagination. Human activity affects the complex ecosystems of this planet at scales incomprehensible to most of us. I think fictional narratives play an important role in bringing abstract concepts such as climate change and 5°C of average global warming down to a human level. The role of fiction is not to come up with solutions for climate change. It is to ask questions: How would a world that is 5°C warmer than today look like? How would a world in which we don’t exploit and destroy our planet look like? How do people live in those worlds? What do they think? How are their surroundings? How do they feel? What makes them cry? What are their hopes and dreams? Trying to find an answer to these questions fuels my writing.

[VW] You’ve written poetry, short fiction, and a novel? What form gives you the most satisfaction?

[CB] I think it’s poetry and screenwriting. After the first feedback came in for my novel, I realized that my screenwriting training had a huge influence on me. And I think I constructed the story more like a film than a novel, which is not always good, but it’s something that comes natural to me because I think in images, which I then translate into words.

[VW] The CHOW is part of my Substack, Space Between, exploring the stories between novels. What is your Space Between like? How do you replenish your creative well?

[CB] The main fuel for my fiction writing is reading non-fiction books. So the space between fiction is non-fiction.

[VW] What’s next for you? Can we expect a sequel?

[CB] There Is Hope is actually the “prequel” to my unwritten main novel, which currently exists as a screenplay. This is what I set out to write in 2013 and what I’ve been wanting to write for the past thirteen years. I’ll start this summer and see where the journey takes me. It will most probably be a duology (hopefully a trilogy) set 1000 years after the events in There Is Hope.

[VW] Thank you so much for joining me today. Good luck in the future!

[CB] Thank you for having me. Good luck with your writing.

If you’re stepping into the “Space Between” for the first time…

Welcome! You’ve arrived at a place where stories do more than just fill pages—they bridge the gap between the big moments of our lives.

Three years ago, I started this journey, wondering if I’d ever have enough to say. Today, I have the joy of knowing that every Friday at 5 a.m. PT, I’m sharing a story with you while you enjoy your morning coffee. This isn’t about chasing algorithms; it’s about doubling down on the “Why” behind my imprint, OT Press: telling human stories about the small choices that lead to real growth.

What to Expect

This is a living world where the characters you first met in Friends In Low Places and Lose Yourself continue to evolve. Here, you’ll find the threads that connect my novels, the current The Piano Man Chronicles, and my upcoming novel, Landslide. You can also read them in print with Space Between: The anthology of stories bridging novels. You get a front-row seat to The CHOW, my interviews with fellow authors about the spaces between their own milestones.

Why Subscribe?

I invite you to join our community and go deeper into the narrative. Subscribers receive special access to exclusive content, including:

• New Stories: Bi-Weekly fiction bridging the gap between my novels.

• The “Space Between” Guide: An insider’s roadmap to my interconnected universe.

• Soundtracks & More: Curated playlists and behind-the-scenes updates.

If you become a paid subscriber, you get those benefits plus a signed copy of either Friends In Low Places or Lose Yourself, plus a copy of the newly released anthology Space Between.

Thank you for joining me. I look forward to meeting you every Friday in the space between.