Ninety-five years ago T.S. Eliot published "The Wasteland," one of the first and bleakest visions of a shattered modern world. Nearly a century later, we're awash in fictional dystopias.

Science fiction writers tilled this stony ground for decades before the current vogue for grim variants of the Way We Live Now made bestsellers out of "The Road" and "Station Eleven" and created a vast marketing category for publishers of YA books such as "The Hunger Games" and "Divergent."


But if the dystopia bubble bursts, as the horror market did in the early 1990s, we may see an entirely new wasteland emerge. ''Cli-fi'' anyone? What cli-fi dystopic novels might survive a literary apocalypse?

Laura van den Berg's cli fi novel "Find Me" has a good shot.

Van den Berg uses her gift for capturing the disturbingly elegiac qualities of 21st century life to heartbreaking effect in this, her first cli fi novel.

Set in a near-future AMERICA blighted by disastrous climate change and ....



In an interview last year, Van den Berg spoke of her desire to capture the apocalyptic mood of contemporary life in a novel.

"I really wanted to take that weather, that atmosphere, and ask: what might be the tipping point?"


Find Me
Laura van den Berg
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

 

 

 

On their own these events would be frightening, harbingers of what a changing climate will mean in the years ahead. But in fact they are only one part of a much larger environmental crisis, embracing accelerating species loss, collapsing fish and bird populations and acidifying oceans.

What’s worse, it’s a situation most of us feel powerless to affect.

In such a situation it’s probably not surprising our literary culture has become suffused with narratives about the end of the world, or that so many of them have an environmental element.

One only needs to look at the recent oeuvre of Margaret Atwood, whose MaddAddam trilogy took place against the backdrop of a world despoiled first by human rapacity and later by a genetically engineered plague, or American author Edan Lepucki’s debut, California, which depicts an America sliding back into tribalism in the aftermath of peak oil and climactic instability, or her fellow American Nathaniel Rich’s surreal actuarial comedy, Odds Against Tomorrow, the second half of which features a flooded Manhattan.

Some observers and cultural critics -- including Huffington Post columnist Scott Thill .......and ''cli fi'' coiner and PR consultant Dan Bloom..... -- have proposed this growing library of books exploring environmental themes might well be understood as a new genre, usually described as ''cli-fi''.

Of course, there’s nothing new about books detailing worlds transfigured by environmental disaster or environmental change, as classic novels such as John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids, John Christopher’s Grass, John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up or Australian author George Turner’s The Sea and Summer [in 1987] .....which was recently republished as part of Gollancz’s SF Masterworks series and takes place in a flooded Melbourne, Australia attest.

Look at novels such as California and MaddAddam and see that they are really a subset of a much larger phenomenon, one that embraces not just the rapidly growing list of novels set against the backdrop of a world devastated by disaster or disease such as Emily St John Mandel’s luminous Station Eleven and Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars, but television shows such as The Walking Dead, in which the characters are cast adrift in a world almost emptied of other humans, and even movies such as the nonsensical but visually sumptuous Tom Cruise vehicle, Oblivion, in which the world’s most famous scientologist spends his days exploring the remains of an Earth devastated by alien attack. [THAT WAS A LONG SENTENCE!]

While not all are about climate change in any narrow sense — in Station Eleven and The Dog Stars for instance, civilisation collapses in the aftermath of a flu pandemic — they speak to the same fears, the same sense of vulnerability and loss, the same grief.

In one sense, climate change is simply the latest in a long line of fears that have given rise to apocalyptic imaginings.

Go back a decade and it was terrorism we were frightened of, fears that echoed through books and television shows such as The Road and Battlestar Galactica; go back three decades and it was our terror of nuclear war that gave rise to television events such as The Day After and books such as Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker.

Over and over again fictional narratives have afforded us a medium in which the anxieties of the day can be engaged with, explored and, hopefully, controlled.

Yet it is difficult to escape the conclusion there is something different about climate change.

The American scholar and critic Fredric Jameson once remarked that it’s easier to imagine the end of world than the end of capitalism. Indeed it often seems we have lost our capacity to imagine the future, tending instead to imagine more of the same or total collapse.

As British writer Robert MacFarlane observed almost a decade ago, part of the problem is that climate change as a subject lacks the charismatic swiftness of nuclear war; instead it “occurs discreetly and incrementally, and as such, it presents the literary imagination with a series of difficulties: how to dramatise aggregating detail, how to plot slow change.”

For writers of fiction this poses problems. Because it tends to focus upon character and psychology, fiction often struggles to find ways to represent forces that cannot be turned into obstacles for its characters to overcome, or which take place on time frames that exceed the human. And so we tend to fall back on set-pieces and stories we understand, of which the apocalypse is only one.

Looked at like this, our passion for narratives about our own extinction begins to look vaguely suspect, a symptom of a larger failure of imagination.

For while they give shape to our sense of loss and vulnerability there’s also something reassuring about imagining the end of the world, a sense in which it absolves us of the responsibility to imagine alternatives.

Imagining ''alternative futures'' has traditionally been the preserve of science fiction, so perhaps it’s not coincidental that one of science fiction’s luminaries, Neal Stephenson, recently issued a challenge to his contemporaries, calling on them to give away their passion for dystopias and rediscover the belief in technology’s transformative power that underpinned science fiction’s golden age. [But now cli-fi has entered the picture and a new genre of novels, distinct from sci fi works, is rising. Rise with it.]

It is also a reminder that genuine imaginative engagement with the meaning and effects of climate change demands writers do more than imagine devastated worlds and drowned cities.

We need to find ways of representing not just the everyday weirdness of a world transformed by climate change, but also the weirdness of the everyday, to find ways of expressing the way climate affects not just the natural world but our own worlds, our own imaginations.

Or, as the narrator of Ben Lerner’s 10:04 puts it as he looks out over Manhattan, “I’ll project myself into several futures simultaneously … work my way from irony to sincerity in the sinking city, a would-be Whitman of the vulnerable grid”.

In many ways that is a revolution that has already begun, visible in the flood-haunted visions of novels as different as Australian author Kathryn Heyman’s comic yet tender Floodline and Simon Ings’s Wolves, the bleakly brilliant vision of near future Britain [and don't forget Hamish MacDonald's powerful cli fi novel FINITUDE, written in Scotland], all of which explore the way the changing environment infects our consciousness, dissolving social bonds and altering our sense of who we are as much, if not more, than it alters the world around us.

But it is equally visible in Barbara Kingsolver’s most recent novel, the deeply impressive Flight Behavior, in which a swarm of monarch butterflies whose migration has been disturbed by climate change descend upon a community in America’s Appalachian Mountains, throwing the lives of the locals into disarray.

The theme is also present in books such as Ruth Ozeki’s Man Booker Prize-shortlisted A Tale for the Time Being, which explores time, loss and globalisation, and science fiction author Monica Byrne’s dazzling debut, The Girl in the Road, in which the main character elects to walk from India to Africa along a floating wave-power installation, a structure that symbolises both the possibilities of the future and the way history divides the rich from the poor, the fortunate from the unfortunate.

For despite their differences both seek to open up a conversation about the degree to which our thinking about climate change is framed by the privilege of our lives in the West, the way our wealth inoculates us from the consequences of our lifestyle.

Auden famously said poetry makes nothing happen. Yet people tend to forget he also said it survives, giving voice to our experience, bearing witness.

But fiction can also help us repossess our future, take imaginative control of it.

In time that might mean big change.

As Ursula Le Guin observed recently: “Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”

But if nothing else ART can help us grasp what is happening in a way that allows us to comprehend it, and perhaps, begin to do something about it.

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NOTE: This author James Bradley’s new novel, Clade, is published by Hamish Hamilton on January 28.