Story Spotlight (Volume I): How To Argue With An Atmosphere

One of the pleasures of writing Volume I was letting each story carry a different flavour, even while they all grew from the same root: a whakataukī that refuses to sit quietly on the page.

If My Love Has No Bounds is one of the tender-hearted stories in the collection, then How To Argue With An Atmosphere is one of the stubborn ones.

 This story begins with the whakataukī: ‘I orea te tuatara ka patu ki waho.’

Translation: A problem is solved by continuing to find solutions.

Meaning: This speaks to creativity, adaptability, and perseverance. To solve a problem, you need all three.

That idea was a gift to write with, because it refuses the fantasy of the single perfect answer.

It does not say there will be one neat fix.

It does not promise that the right person will stride in, press the correct button, and look marvellous while doing it.

It says you keep going.

You adapt.

You think again.

You hit the problem from another angle.

And then, if that still doesn’t work, you do it again with better math's and less optimism.

Which, frankly, is most engineering.

In How To Argue With An Atmosphere, the problem is gloriously unreasonable: a colony on the planet Raukura is being battered by atmospheric shockwaves after a catastrophic eruption, and the air itself has become a threat. Not a monster. Not an invading fleet. Not some tidy villain with a speech prepared.

The weather. Or, more accurately, physics in a particularly foul mood.

At the centre of the story is Erihapeti, who hears the planet speak and immediately recognises it for what it is: not an impossibility, but a new problem. And that, to me, is the heart of the story. The future is full of systems, dangers, and forces bigger than any one person, but the human response to them is often beautifully familiar. Someone has to keep their head. Someone has to look at the disaster and say, right then, what can still be done?

That is where this whakataukī lives.

Not in grand declarations, but in persistence.

Not in perfection, but in adjustment.

Not in certainty, but in refusing to sit inside the problem and call it home.

I had a great deal of fun writing this story because it let me lean into some of my favourite things at once: strange planetary conditions, engineering under pressure, humour used as emotional scaffolding, and the particular kind of competence that looks less like heroism and more like exhaustion with tools.

There is also something deliciously human about a story in which people are essentially forced to admit that they have moved across the stars only to discover that they are still, in the end, negotiating with reality. We may build domes and towers and clever systems with names that sound expensive, but the universe remains unimpressed. It will still hand us a crisis and wait to see whether we panic, adapt, or start arguing with the atmosphere as though it has personally offended us.

In this story, naturally, they do a bit of all three.

What I love most about How To Argue With An Atmosphere is that perseverance is not treated as noble suffering for its own sake. It is active. Practical. Iterative. It is ugly in places. It leaks. It rattles. It breaks water mains and ruins everyone’s day. But it also keeps people alive.

That matters.

The whakataukī asks for creative thinking, adaptability, and endurance, and the story answers by giving us a colony that survives not because anyone has all the answers, but because they keep building the next answer. Then the next one. Then the next. It is the accumulated force of many small solutions, pushed outward against a very large problem.

There is something deeply hopeful in that, though not the soft, decorative kind of hope. More the work-boot variety. Hope with a wrench in its hand and sleep deprivation in its eyes.

Which is often the most trustworthy kind.

This story also let me write one of the recurring truths I love most in science fiction: progress does not remove the need for courage, humility, or ingenuity. It just gives those qualities more dramatic scenery. Whether you are patching a leak in a corridor full of mineral mist or trying to keep a dome from being punched apart by a planet, the question remains much the same: what do we do now?

And the answer, here, is simple enough to be difficult:

We keep going.

We keep thinking.

We keep adjusting.

We keep finding solutions.

That is what this story is built on.

So if My Love Has No Bounds is about love becoming shelter, then How To Argue With An Atmosphere is about perseverance becoming method. It is one of the stories in Volume I that leans hardest into pressure, problem-solving, and the stubborn intelligence of people who refuse to surrender just because the universe has started shouting.

Also, I admit I have a soft spot for any story where the weather behaves like a personal enemy and the engineers respond by becoming more annoying than the weather.

That feels right to me.

 — Rebecca