<
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/aug/16/blue-sky-thinking-why-we-need-positive-climate-novels>
"Nearly a quarter of a century ago when I published my first novel,
Haweswater, about the impact of dam-building in north-west England, nature
writing felt quite different, at least for me. Several landmark novels about
climate apocalypse and survivalism had been published, including
Z for
Zachariah by Robert C O’Brien and
The Death of Grass by John Christopher,
but there was no imperative to write about such things. These stories involved
anomalistic catastrophes – a mutated virus, nuclear war – and they were very
bleak. They resonated but also seemed unusual. At the other end of the scale,
Ben Elton’s
Stark had comedically outlined the nature of oligarchic greed,
resource consumption, and the ruination we were hurtling towards, while the
Bezos and Musk equivalents could head off-world – not quite so funny now.
The public knew about climate issues, though terminology often stressed them
individually – ozone depletion, greenhouse warming, desertification, coral
bleaching – rather than total Earth systems breakdown. Disparate, visionary
science fictions didn’t indicate a genre movement yet. There was a luxury of
choice regarding stories related to nature – no elephant in the room (or polar
bear), if you didn’t tackle climate-change concerns.
In the 2000s, while the scientific data was righting itself from hacks and
attacks, a whole spate of alarming nonfiction books arrived, forecasting the
devastating effect of global temperature rises, mass extinctions, and the
chaotic world that would occur if our trajectory of fossil fuel consumption,
industrial farming, deforestation and the like wasn’t altered. Books like
Six
Degrees (Mark Lynas),
A World Without Bees (Alison Benjamin and Brian
McCallum), and
Half Gone (Jeremy Leggett) sounded the doom gong, loudly.
As a news-hungry novelist, I responded, wringing jeopardy from these
predictions to create a dire, possible future. Full-throttle dystopian
speculation seemed to be appropriate. I wrote
The Carhullan Army, which
imagines female paramilitary resistance in a Britain destabilised by flooding
and politically fascistic, where rationing and population control are the new
norms. Looking back, I can see this story arrived out of pure, exhilarated fear
about impending ecological disaster, the repressive systems which could arise
out of it and their effect, especially, on women. It was an attempt to ring the
same warning bell, to create a virtual, experiential realm for the reader out
of their propositions.
Fiction writers were turning towards the situation. Cormac McCarthy’s
The
Road, perhaps the most horrific, cataclysmic fable of this era, while never
explicitly naming its disaster, depicts, as George Monbiot noted, the extreme
consequences of “a world without a biosphere”. A decade later,
The End We
Start From by Megan Hunter, imagines a saturated, desolated England, with
migration south to north as characters struggle to control their lives. Water
shortages, drought and expanding sands feature in Claire Vaye Watkins’ novel,
Gold Fame Citrus, where countercultural Californians try to get to grips with
a brutal new wilderness almost too big for human comprehension. Too big for
comprehension, regarding the world’s threatened environmental state, would
become our existential sufferance."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
