Reading Projects [11]: Cli-Fi
Twenty-Five Novels To Read Before They Become Nonfiction
"Electoral campaign,” Isaac Cordal Berlin, Germany (April 2011)*I’d dearly love to take credit for today’s subtitle, but I swiped it from The New York Public Library website.1 And now I find a piece in LitHub—”On the False Promise of Climate Fiction” by journalist Emma Pattee.2 My thoughts on her ideas have yet to take shape—I’ll get back to you.
In the meantime, whichever way we view this crisis, whatever questions it raises in us—where we stand in its timeline, whether it’s “already too late” (and what that phrase even means), whether planet-wide cooperation is (even remotely) possible, what kind of remediation is feasible (now or with breakthrough technologies), whether we should cry game over or, instead, see cycles of change/adaptation as the basic reality of life on Earth—writing about it will, increasingly, commandeer the the attention of our writers.
The books in today’s list are a shotgun blast. Some more science-y than others, some more high-brow/literary, some more meditative, some more thriller-y; some depict the world’s citizens working in concert, most don’t. End-of-the-world scenarios have attracted writers as long as there’s been storytelling. It feels presumptuous to say our era has a special claim to the subject. But it does feel that way—to me at least. This wave of writing feels more desperately urgent/necessary, more likely to shove other topics off the playing field.
[I added a note to the above, but it’s a bit bulky . . . find it at the end of today’s post.]
25 CLI-FI NOVELS:
The Last Beekeeper, Julie Carrick Dalton (2023)3
*The Great Transition, Nick Fuller Googins (2023)4
The Deluge, Stephen Markley (2023)5
*The Light Pirate, Lily Brooks-Dalton (2022)6
The High House, Jessie Greengrass (2022)7
The Annual Migration of Clouds, Premee Mohamed (2021)8
*Termination Shock, Neal Stephenson (2021)9
Migrations, Charlotte Mcconaghy (2020)10
*The Ministry For the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson (2020)11
All City, Alex DiFrancesco (2019)12
*Stillicide, Cynan Jones (2019)13
Bangkok Wakes to Rain, Pitchaya Sudbanthad (2019)14
Blackfish City, Sam J. Miller (2018)15
*American War, Omar El Akkad (2017)16
*The End of the Ocean, Maja Lunde (2017) [English trans. from Norwegian by Diane Oatley (2020)]17
*New York 2140, Kim Stanley Robinson (2017)18
*The Water Knife, Paolo Bacigalupi (2015)19
Tentacle, Rita Indiana (2015) [English trans. from Spanish by Achy Obejas (2018)]20
The Fifth Season, N. K. Jemisin (2015)21
*Gold Fame Citrus, Claire Vaye Watkins (2015)22
MaddAddam Trilogy,23 Margaret Atwood: MaddAddam (2014), The Year of the Flood (2010), *Oryx and Crake (2004)
The Odds Against Tomorrow, Nathaniel Rich (2013)24
Parable of the Sower, Octavia E. Butler (1993)25
*The Sheep Look Up, John Brunner (1972)26
[*I’ve read]
The project/challenge:
Read any five of these works.
Take some notes. If you buy copies, write in the margins.
Make it your responsibility to dig up a few other examples of this genre (remembering that we’re talking about cli-fi in particular, not other species of end-times lit27 ).
Afterword: Further thought about end-of-the-world scenarios
This is not a new subject, only its undeniable palpability is new, and to date we haven’t run out of ways to imagine and write about it.
But as a teacher of writing, I want to raise [again] the “Everybody’s mother dies” problem. It goes like this: Your mother dies; you want to write about it (fictively or nonfictively) because it’s such a big deal in your life. But unless you’re an exceptionally keen writer, and unless the details are themselves exceptional (exceptional as in “an exception to the rule”), giving the details isn’t enough. Huh? you say, stunned, Whaddya mean? My mother died! This is where I reply, Everybody’s mother dies. Unless you’re like the high school girl in Bozeman, many moons ago, whose reaction to my mild editing suggestions was: Because of you I’ll never write again! . . . unless you’re like her, you’ll want to know WTF I’m getting at.
It’s this: Just because it happens to you doesn’t make it special to anyone else. You have to do something with it. You have to find the subject in the subject, you have to transform it from something that happened into an art object.
When AIDS was brand new, it was shocking/horrifying (and how ironic that it took aim first at our art-making cohort). For a while, it was enough to say what was happening. But later—and here’s where a writing teacher can seem heartless—they started to pile up, the AIDS stories; it became, Oh, hmm, another AIDS story—
But then a little more time passed and we got Angels in America.28
When I started writing novels, my reading of short stories dropped off, but here are two I love from way back that make my point: Susan Sontag’s, “The Way We Live Now” (in The New Yorker, 1986), and Alice Elliott Dark’s, “In the Gloaming” (ditto, 1993). Sontag’s is about the community surrounding the sick man, who remains unnamed; the friends—though you’re not aware of this at first—have names representing all the letters of the alphabet. This formal experiment produced a moving, one-of-kind29 story: It sounds like this:
At first he was just losing weight, he felt only a little ill, Max said to Ellen, and he didn’t call for an appointment with his doctor, according to Greg, because he was managing to keep on working at more or less the same rhythm, but he did stop smoking, Tanya pointed out, which suggests he was frightened, but also that he wanted, even more than he knew, to be healthy, or healthier, or maybe just to gain back a few pounds, said Orson . . .
In Dark’s story, a young man returns home to die. How is the grimness modulated into art? The mother grows close to the son in his extremis, the father keeps his distance (we infer that he was never reconciled to his son’s queerness). Great stories give us something extra at the end (the word modulation reminds me that music sometimes does this, too, ends on a new note [as in Leon Russell’s bittersweet “A Song for You,” which ends G, G, G, G // G, G, G, F#] . . . Anyway, the turn at the end of “In the Gloaming”: after the son’s death, the father approaches the mother and asks her to tell him about their son. Just quietly a gut punch.
And so the question that led to this afterword: Will it be, Ho hum, another Climate Armageddon Novel? Or will the urgency of the subject plus the inventiveness of our writers make this a non-issue?
What do you think?
*Website for artist of opening graphic, Isaac Cordal:
https://cementeclipses.com/
Before it becomes nonfiction:
https://www.nypl.org/blog/2023/09/08/compelling-climate-fiction-read-it-becomes- nonfiction
LitHub:
https://lithub.com/on-the-false-promise-of-climate-fiction/The Last Beekeeper: from Amazon:
It’s been more than a decade since the world has come undone, and Sasha Severn has returned to her childhood home with one goal in mind―find the mythic research her father, the infamous Last Beekeeper, hid before he was incarcerated. There, Sasha is confronted with a group of squatters who have claimed the quiet, idyllic farm as their own. While she initially feels threatened, the group soon becomes her newfound family, offering what she hasn't felt since her father was imprisoned: security and hope. Maybe it's time to forget the family secrets buried on the farm and focus on her future.
Transition: Just finished this one. Good world building. An action-driven plot couched in an affecting family story; does a good job of imagining the politics of change—crisis, action, reaction, reaction to reaction, evolving conditions, how people refer to stages of this change, where the new centers of world power are, and how diverging personal mandates (stay and care for loved ones vs. act as leader of radical change) play out within a family.
Deluge: This is a major new work, one of my next reads. Long and dense and scientific.
Light Pirate: Starred review from Kirkus: "A formidable young woman’s coming-of-age . . . Brooks-Dalton creates an all-too-believable picture of nature reclaiming Florida from its human inhabitants, and her complex and engaging characters make climate disaster a vividly individual experience rather than an abstract subject of debate." Her debut novel, Good Morning, Midnight [filmed by George Clooney as The Midnight Sky], was widely praised—story of an elderly scientist isolated in the Arctic and an astronaut attempting a return to Earth.
[Starred review from Kirkus?? Wonders never cease. They always seemed like a gang of snot-nosed grad-school naysayers to me.]
High House: Starred review from Publishers Weekly: “Quietly devastating ... [the characters'] gradual reckoning with their existence and the fate of the planet is made heartbreaking through Greengrass’s stunning prose. Painful and beautiful, this is not to be missed.”
Annual Migration: From a blurb: “With keen insight and biting prose, Premee Mohamed delivers a deeply personal tale in this post-apocalyptic hopepunk novella that reflects on the meaning of community and asks what we owe to those who have lifted us up.”
Neal Stephenson: I was a big fan of Seveneves—also liked Cryptonomicon, and Snow Crash, though I gave up on The Baroque Cycle [Quicksilver (2003), The Confusion (2004) and The System of the World (2004)]. The novels are richly inventive, rich in thought and science—serious work that can go on too long, or, at times, get too . . . I’m not sure what quality it is I object to—some of his critics think he packs too much info/science/explanation into some of the books, but that’s not it for me . . . The Baroque Cycle stopped seeming serious to me—but seriousness is a tricky thing. I certainly don’t favor books that feel deadly serious—i.e. humorless, heavyheavyheavy (all good writing should feel buoyant no matter its topic). Non-serious writing seems under-edited, self-indulgent, either user-unfriendly or lazy or name-droppy or desperate for readers to applaud not its wisdom or passion but its cleverness.
[Then again, maybe you love The Baroque Cycle.]
Migrations: National Bestseller. Amazon Editors' Pick for Best Book of the Year in Fiction.
"Visceral and haunting" (New York Times Book Review)· "Hopeful" (Washington Post) · "Powerful" (Los Angeles Times)· "Tantalizingly beautiful" (Elle)· "Suspenseful, atmospheric" (Vogue)· "Aching and poignant" (Guardian)· "Gripping" (The Economist).
You get the idea.
Kim Stanley Robinson: I think this will prove to be a lasting contribution to climate literature. It comes from a well-seasoned pro who has a scientist’s grasp of the issues and writes hard books to put down. There’s a long passage at the start of the novel about a heat crisis in India that is highly plausible, gruesome, impossible to not be moved by. This work [like The Great Transition] offers a hopeful scenario, a model for cooperation, problem-solving, intelligent forward movement. I don’t have a smidgen of climate optimism myself, but it’s good to find other perspectives.
All City: From the publisher, Seven Stories Press:
In a near-future New York City in which both global warming and a tremendous economic divide are making the city unlivable for many, a huge superstorm hits, leaving behind only those who had nowhere else to go and no way to get out.
Makayla is a twenty-four-year-old woman who works at the convenience store chain that’s taken over the city. Jesse, an eighteen-year-old, genderqueer, anarchist punk lives in an abandoned IRT station in the Bronx. Their paths cross in the aftermath of the storm when they, along with others devastated by the loss of their homes, carve out a small sanctuary in an abandoned luxury condo.
Stillicide: Young Welsh writer of small tense idiosyncratic novels. This is a right jab of a story—a sniper tasked with protecting a “water train” from terrorists has to make a snap decision. In all the cli-fi lists I’ve powered through, I’ve never seen this one, which is a shame. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I found it tough to track on a first reading—each of the short chapters puts you in the moment, and they jump around; on second reading it makes perfect sense—rather like The English Patient in this regard. His website:
https://www.cynanjones.net/
Bangkok: From the Bookshop.org site:
A best book of 2019, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Paste, and Kirkus.
"[An examination of] hidden, overlooked spaces, where ghosts and spirits and discarded dreams orbit, even as people try to outpace the past...[stories] intersect and build on one another, like banana leaves woven to make a floating offering for the water spirits . . . Bangkok is changing too fast, shedding layers of its history like the skins of a snake. Yet the city retains its allure, and the quest to return is like some animal." --New York Times Book Review (Editor's Choice)
"Fluid in its structure and aqueous in its themes, the novel vividly evokes the teeming, sweltering city." --The New Yorker
Blackfish: From Ecco Press [publisher, in a different millenium, of my second book of stories].
From a blurb: After the climate wars, a floating city is constructed in the Arctic Circle, a remarkable feat of mechanical and social engineering, complete with geothermal heating and sustainable energy. The city’s denizens have become accustomed to a roughshod new way of living, however, the city is starting to fray along the edges—crime and corruption have set in, the contradictions of incredible wealth alongside direst poverty are spawning unrest, and a new disease called “the breaks” is ravaging the population.
. . . Blackfish City is a remarkably urgent—and ultimately very hopeful—novel about political corruption, organized crime, technology run amok, the consequences of climate change, gender identity, and the unifying.
And here’s a link from Lamba Review:
https://lambdaliterary.org/2018/06/blackfish-city/American War: The next American Civil War. Very well-reviewed. Just finished reading this. I wish it were less possible-seeming. As with many theme-oriented novels, the scenario grabs you and gives the story gravitas, but the avidness of your reading comes from an extraordinary character at the center.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_War_(novel)
End of Ocean: From Kirkus (starred review):
“Two stories on the impact of climate change intersect in this thoughtful and suspenseful novel . . . Both halves of the story are convincingly detailed and quietly wrenching, and Lunde gradually and subtly draws them together to powerful effect.”
[Another good review from Kirkus?? Good lord.]
New York 2140: I read this after Ministry For the Future—it’s a good story, but the later book is a greater leap of imagination, has more power in terms of climate argument, and seems a stronger work of art.
Water Knife:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Water_Knife
Tentacle: From a U.K. press I subscribed to, & Other Stories, but it migrated to my old son’s house and I haven’t read it. It seems to have a rep for being a hard read, but it’s not long and sometimes taking the challenge is worth the trouble, no?
Fifth Season: Haven’t read this one either, but it pops up so often I’m led to think she has a substantial, well-earned fan base. In my TBR stack.
Gold Fame: Watkins’ second book after Battleborn [stories] (2012)], published by Riverhead.
From a blurb: . . . set in a near-future dystopian California ravaged by extreme drought. The landscape of the Southwest is increasingly dominated by the rapidly expanding, ever shifting sands known as the Amargosa Dune Sea. Luz Dunn is a 25 year old former model squatting in Los Angeles, where it has not rained for years.
Watkins wrote a scathing critique of Battleborn, “On Pandering,” for Tin House in 2016.
https://tinhouse.com/on-pandering/A young writer on the fast track.
Atwood: An overview from The Independent:
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/review-maddaddam-by-margaret-atwood-8755671.htmlOdds:
The New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice): “Any sentence from Rich is worth reading, any thought worth pondering in this ambitious novel of ideas.”
Alan Cheuse, NPR's All Things Considered: “The opposite of disaster, a knockout of a book by a young writer to keep your eye on from now on . . . As terrifically described as any of the best science fiction we have.”
Vanity Fair: “Scarily prescient and wholly original.”
Parable: Butler is a major gap in my reading in this vein. She’s a major figure. Read about her:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OctaviaE._Butler
Sheep: People don’t seem to remember Brunner. He wrote a huge number of sci-fi paperbacks (also some spy novels, some straight novels, some poetry) . . . but besides The Sheep Look Up, he wrote at least two other seminal, long-respected sci-fi works: Stand on Zanzibar (1968) and The Shockwave Rider (1975). Sheep is a wild read—sharp and inventive; it should stand with the work of mainstream writers from his era. [The paperback edition I have has an, um, impactful cover involving a gas mask; quoting my long-suffering wife: “God, don’t leave that thing where I have to see it!”]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Brunner_(author)
Cli-fi: For instance, I avoided including The Road (2006), which I consider one of the great books of this century; it’s post-apocalyptic, but not cli-fi.
Angels:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angels_in_AmericaOne-of-a-kind: This is for those of you who’ve wearied of my incessant use of the term sui generis. You’re welcome.
I also loved The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi (2009) and his short stories. Could not manage The Water Knife. It's waiting for a stronger moment in my life.
The Dazzle of Day by Molly Gloss
A small group of people board a generation ship, hoping to find a habitable alternative to their world of overwhelming pollution and ecological exhaustion.