A Climate-Fiction Novel

THE LAST
GENERATION

In a near-future Key West being surrendered to rising seas, Mari and Leo are growing up at the edge of a world that is literally receding around them.

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Cover of The Last Generation by Tyler Francko

A World Changing

Rising seas. Managed retreat. A new reality for coastal communities.

A Home Unraveling

Key West is more than a place—it is memory, culture, history, and identity.

A Generation Choosing

When the past is slipping away and the future is uncertain, what do you fight for?

Illustrated promotional art for The Last Generation

The Story

Not the end of the world. The end of a world.

Key West is still standing. But not for much longer.

As the government begins a Managed Retreat from the Florida Keys, Mari and Leo face a future built around leaving behind the only home they have ever known.

The Key West Archive offers one way to preserve what is being lost. Their relationship offers another. But memory is not the same as survival, and saving a record of a place cannot stop the water from coming.

Near-Future Key West

A future close enough to recognize.

The crisis does not arrive all at once. It arrives as policy, weather, abandonment, adaptation, and ordinary people trying to keep living.

The novel treats climate change not only as an environmental problem, but as a cultural one. What happens to identity when a hometown becomes an evacuation zone? What survives when geography does not?

Promotional image of a storm-damaged Key West street

Memory

What happens when the places that shaped us survive only in photographs, stories, and records?

Belonging

Home is more than geography, but leaving can reveal just how deeply geography shaped everything else.

Inheritance

The youngest generation did not create the crisis, yet they inherit both its consequences and the choices that follow.

Promotional portrait for The Last Generation

At the Center of the Story

Mari

A generation can inherit a world it never chose—and still have to decide what deserves to survive.

Mari's story turns the large-scale language of climate change into something intimate: family, friendship, home, uncertainty, and the fear of becoming a refugee from your own childhood.

Alongside Leo, she must decide whether preserving the past means holding onto it—or learning how to carry it somewhere new.

Visual World

Storm, water, memory.

The visual language of The Last Generation moves between damaged reality and remembered possibility—the island as it is, as it was, and as its people fear it may become.

The Last Generation

What do we save when a place can no longer be saved?

A story of memory, belonging, climate change, and the people asked to inherit a world already in retreat.

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THE LASTGENERATION