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12wonderY
Maureen mentioned "climate horror" fiction in another thread.
Seems the subject deserves its own thread in this group.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_fiction
What have you read, and what did you think of it?
Seems the subject deserves its own thread in this group.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_fiction
What have you read, and what did you think of it?
22wonderY
The first one in my library is Ice!, by Arnold Federbush.
It's an obscure title from the 70s, but exciting and optimistic; one that my daughters and I have read repeatedly.
This posits an explosive change in climate, because of pollution, toward arctic extremes. It follows a few people who are successful in adapting to the new conditions, both physical and cultural.
It's an obscure title from the 70s, but exciting and optimistic; one that my daughters and I have read repeatedly.
This posits an explosive change in climate, because of pollution, toward arctic extremes. It follows a few people who are successful in adapting to the new conditions, both physical and cultural.
32wonderY
I tried to read Memory of Water, as it had great reviews a couple of years back.
In a post-climate change world, water is in very short supply, and the government uses the water supply to control the population. Finland is one of the last inhabitable areas. Much technology has been lost and people scavenge the waste dumps of the past for useful items, or things that can be converted into useful objects.
One reviewer mentions an almond tree, which is incongruous, as they need a lot of water.
I found it surprisingly stale. The story lacks coherence and believability. I want my end of the world stories to have reasons, not just scenarios.
In a post-climate change world, water is in very short supply, and the government uses the water supply to control the population. Finland is one of the last inhabitable areas. Much technology has been lost and people scavenge the waste dumps of the past for useful items, or things that can be converted into useful objects.
One reviewer mentions an almond tree, which is incongruous, as they need a lot of water.
I found it surprisingly stale. The story lacks coherence and believability. I want my end of the world stories to have reasons, not just scenarios.
42wonderY
The story in the news today about the water shortage in Chennai, India remind me of Dry, by Neal Schusterman.
Arizona cuts off the water supply from the Colorado River and the whole southern half of California is all of a sudden dry. This story centers on five teens who end up together and what they do to survive.
The story breaks down midway through, but the earlier half kinda draws out what might really happen if government drops the ball on notifications and remediation, not to even mention pre-planning or avoidance measures.
Arizona cuts off the water supply from the Colorado River and the whole southern half of California is all of a sudden dry. This story centers on five teens who end up together and what they do to survive.
The story breaks down midway through, but the earlier half kinda draws out what might really happen if government drops the ball on notifications and remediation, not to even mention pre-planning or avoidance measures.
52wonderY
Jenny Offill is featured in the New York Times Magazine this week, for her novel, Weather.
The article itself, unsurprising, is well written too.
How to Write Fiction When the Planet Is Falling Apart
In 2005, the naturalist Robert Macfarlane asked, in an influential essay in The Guardian: “Where is the literature of climate change? Where are the novels, the plays, the poems, the songs, the libretti, of this massive contemporary anxiety?” How should we understand the paucity of the cultural response to climate change, he asked, compared with the body of work catalyzed by the threat of nuclear war? In recent years, however, planetary collapse has emerged as a dominant concern in contemporary fiction; there have been major novels by Louise Erdrich, Barbara Kingsolver, David Mitchell, Ian McEwan, Jeff VanderMeer, Kim Stanley Robinson and Jeanette Winterson. Margaret Atwood’s “The Testaments,” which examines the connections between totalitarianism and despoliation, shared the Booker Prize last year. Richard Powers’s “The Overstory,” which follows a group of environmental activists, took the Pulitzer Prize in fiction.
The climate crisis, Offill shows, is reshaping not just our world but also our minds. “Weather” joins other new fiction in transforming the novel of consciousness into a record of climate grief. “Sometimes I think that people today must be the saddest people ever, because we know we ruined everything,” the heroine of Lucy Ellmann’s “Ducks, Newburyport” thinks. One of Deborah Eisenberg’s insomniac narrators frets: “I was exhausted, though still wide awake, as I was so often — wide awake, and thinking about things I couldn’t do anything about. Couldn’t do anything about. Couldn’t do anything about.”
It is the “incredulity response” Offill described to me: How do we keep passivity at bay? Perhaps with a narrative that never permits passivity. It’s not merely the fragments themselves that feel so powerful in her work but also the silences between them, the way they require the reader to pay attention, step in, supply the connections between the snippets. We are invited to take possession of the book in its white spaces in a way that feels like preparation to live more fully in the world.
…
In the early days of writing “Weather,” Offill imagined it as a survival manual for her daughter, cramming it with information about every possible catastrophe, with tear-out sheets on practical tips. Some of these remain: notes on starting a fire with only a gum wrapper and a battery, or making a candle with a can of tuna fish.
The leap in Offill’s work is how she imagines expanding this circle of domestic care to include the world, harnessing this powerful, private force and releasing it into the collective. In “Weather,” Lizzie comes across the Buddhist idea that in previous lives we have all been one another’s mother, sister, child. “We should treat each person we encounter as if they are our beloved.” “Enmeshed” is the word she starts to use to understand her relationship with her brother, her sharp, painful attentiveness to his vulnerability. The form of the book enacts that very enmeshment — the fragments that hook into each other, rhyme and repeat. “What do you mean interconnected?” a caller asks on an environmental podcast Lizzie listens to. “There is a pause and then the ecologist speaks. ‘There is a species of moth in Madagascar that drinks the tears of sleeping birds.’ ”
The article itself, unsurprising, is well written too.
How to Write Fiction When the Planet Is Falling Apart
In 2005, the naturalist Robert Macfarlane asked, in an influential essay in The Guardian: “Where is the literature of climate change? Where are the novels, the plays, the poems, the songs, the libretti, of this massive contemporary anxiety?” How should we understand the paucity of the cultural response to climate change, he asked, compared with the body of work catalyzed by the threat of nuclear war? In recent years, however, planetary collapse has emerged as a dominant concern in contemporary fiction; there have been major novels by Louise Erdrich, Barbara Kingsolver, David Mitchell, Ian McEwan, Jeff VanderMeer, Kim Stanley Robinson and Jeanette Winterson. Margaret Atwood’s “The Testaments,” which examines the connections between totalitarianism and despoliation, shared the Booker Prize last year. Richard Powers’s “The Overstory,” which follows a group of environmental activists, took the Pulitzer Prize in fiction.
The climate crisis, Offill shows, is reshaping not just our world but also our minds. “Weather” joins other new fiction in transforming the novel of consciousness into a record of climate grief. “Sometimes I think that people today must be the saddest people ever, because we know we ruined everything,” the heroine of Lucy Ellmann’s “Ducks, Newburyport” thinks. One of Deborah Eisenberg’s insomniac narrators frets: “I was exhausted, though still wide awake, as I was so often — wide awake, and thinking about things I couldn’t do anything about. Couldn’t do anything about. Couldn’t do anything about.”
It is the “incredulity response” Offill described to me: How do we keep passivity at bay? Perhaps with a narrative that never permits passivity. It’s not merely the fragments themselves that feel so powerful in her work but also the silences between them, the way they require the reader to pay attention, step in, supply the connections between the snippets. We are invited to take possession of the book in its white spaces in a way that feels like preparation to live more fully in the world.
…
In the early days of writing “Weather,” Offill imagined it as a survival manual for her daughter, cramming it with information about every possible catastrophe, with tear-out sheets on practical tips. Some of these remain: notes on starting a fire with only a gum wrapper and a battery, or making a candle with a can of tuna fish.
The leap in Offill’s work is how she imagines expanding this circle of domestic care to include the world, harnessing this powerful, private force and releasing it into the collective. In “Weather,” Lizzie comes across the Buddhist idea that in previous lives we have all been one another’s mother, sister, child. “We should treat each person we encounter as if they are our beloved.” “Enmeshed” is the word she starts to use to understand her relationship with her brother, her sharp, painful attentiveness to his vulnerability. The form of the book enacts that very enmeshment — the fragments that hook into each other, rhyme and repeat. “What do you mean interconnected?” a caller asks on an environmental podcast Lizzie listens to. “There is a pause and then the ecologist speaks. ‘There is a species of moth in Madagascar that drinks the tears of sleeping birds.’ ”
6pamur
Has anyone read any of Paolo Bacigalupi books? His dystopian novels Windup Girl and Water Knife are both science fiction stories that are concerned with climate change and resource depletion.
Devenir membre pour poster.
