As readers of my posts know, I’m attentive to climate fiction, whether in the form of reading and reviewing or in exploring the efficacy of climate fiction to help readers more clearly acknowledge the consequences of climate change in their own lives and then, possibly, become more active in the solutions to reducing the harm of climate change and our move toward renewable energy to replace fossil fuels. For instance, I’ve written a post titled “Climate Change Fiction: An Academic Perspective,” that looks at some early efforts on the part of academia to assess the value of climate fiction. I’ve written a post arguing that climate fiction can help develop political and social actions supporting climate progress, “Can Climate Fiction Help with Climate Change?”
Literary Hub, one of my daily check-ins, is an online newsletter that gives an old English Major like me some sense of what transpires in today’s literary world. The topic of climate change writing, both fiction and non-fiction, has seen dozens of articles on this site over the past several years.
I was thrilled/anxious to see the latest such appear, titled “On the False Promise of Climate Fiction: Are We Already Beyond Raising Awareness?” written by Emma Pattee, on November 14, 2023. Her Literary Hub bio reads as follows:
Emma Pattee is a climate journalist and writer from Oregon. She has written for The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and more. She coined the term “Climate Shadow” to describe an individual’s potential impact on climate change. Her fiction has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Idaho Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and others. Her debut novel, Animal Sounds, will be released by Simon & Schuster in 2025.
She early on mentions Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, a professor of Environmental Studies at Yale-NUS College, which my own post mentioned above (“Climate Change Fiction: An Academic Perspective”) covers. What he found, through survey-based experiments, is that after a modest-sized group of students read two short stories about climate change, there was “a small increase in concern [about climate change] immediately afterward, but that this concern faded out of existence within a month.”
Pattee cites Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future as an example of climate fiction and suggests that even this work, considered by many as a seminal climate fiction, does little for readers for what I guess we could call “climate change activist conversion therapy,” although there’s no citation of evidence yea or nay. I argue that Robinson’s novel is an example of exactly the sort of climate fiction most likely to raise awareness of climate change, and expand this awareness into action, even if the action is to be better informed on the complex issues of climate change and the number of fundamental solutions on offer throughout the book. Robinson’s presentation of the role of fiscal policies at the highest levels (the Fed and other nations’ central banks developing a future value investment currency) is just one example of a solution’s complexity, and in the novel he shows how this might work. My takeaway here is that a) I’ve gotten an expanded sense of the complexities we face; b) I am more informed of the role fiscal policies can play; and c) I am better positioned to make informed choices within the political realm, plus, the book is a very engaging read, so not a bad day’s work, if you ask me. By the way, I briefly discuss Robinson’s works, along with some other climate fiction authors, in the post “Climate Fiction, Part One,” published on July 23, 2023.
Pattee writes that “The reality is that we have no idea what climate fiction does or doesn’t do,” but I wonder if this is off the mark. The right question to ask might be about the kind of climate fiction that solicits real climate change awareness in the reader. What are the characteristics of such climate fiction?
We all know about post-apocalyptic climate fiction, where X numbers of years or decades or centuries from now the world is a wasteland of desert or some sort of drowned waterworld or perhaps a series of silo shelters buried deep or maybe in orbit. Is this slant on climate fiction likely to produce armies of climate activists? I don’t think you need researchers to give you the answer: such stories may be fun but serve only to distance the readers from the climate crisis they find themselves in. As entertaining and well-written some of these stories may be, they are escapist entertainment just like space operas or romance bodice rippers, and if an author hopes the story serves as an allegory, well, bully, but allegory itself puts readers at a remove. I’ve tried to address this category of climate fiction in another post, “Fun with Apocalypse.”
Certainly, fiction holds the capacity to have readers identify with characters and to see themselves in the fictional worlds on the page (or audio, or video, or, I suppose some day, VR), and such identification is where climate fiction is most likely to move the reader from curiosity to knowledge and from knowledge to action.
Pattee goes on to quote Omar El-Akkad, whose American War is often cited (rightly) as climate fiction, who says that a debate about climate fiction “working” or not is a disservice to what art is supposed to be. “A lot of this has to do with the notion, which I find particularly insidious, that art is a problem to be solved,” he said. “Trying to take a fundamentally rational approach to solving art, to writing the perfect climate novel that’s going to cause people to change their minds and fix the climate crisis, is nonsensical.” No one can argue with this; after all, look at “fundamentally rational,” “solving art,” and “perfect climate novel” which sets up a straw man.
Pattee doesn’t mention Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, and his argument that every work of fiction now being written should be writing about climate change because this is an inescapable aspect of human life today. I’m not a fan of his snooty view of “genre” fiction being beneath “literary” fiction, but he is nailing climate change as an unequivocal aspect of human life today, and certainly for literary fiction—or, perhaps, more accurately put, contemporary fiction that addresses our current and near future time—this seems axiomatic.
Literature can take many forms and styles, and by no means are some all that conducive to contemporary reality (historical fiction is one example; the afore-mentioned space operas, another). But any literature that has readers identifying with the present/near-present characters and worlds portrayed has the potential to be quite effective in educating about the climate crisis and thus helping the reader be that much closer to be able to act on the climate crisis. Literature has a special power to do this, by bringing readers into a world they themselves inhabit in the course of the read, and if that world strikes them as a mirror of their own, the identification with the climate crisis is likely to endure. You need characters that are identifiable, environments that are recognizable, and problems that are knowable.
Well, this is what I hope, at any rate. My series, of which the first book, Kill Well, published in September, and where the second of the four books, Dear Josephine, is scheduled for release in early 2024, presents a world most (well, most Americans, anyway; well, most privileged Americans) recognize. And for most Americans—despite the numbers killed in Lahaini or those dead of heat this year in the Southwest region or the recently killed by flood here in the Northeast—climate crisis is a matter of the news, not of unyielding visceral experience. This will be less and less a matter of easy escape as time moves forward, but what is already proving inescapable is the general dread and economic pressures climate change is bringing to bear on we lucky few. So maybe the way to write best about climate change in our country is to write about the most precious of all American icons, our pocketbooks. The facts of economic effects of climate change are growing clearer and stronger. The solution, of course, is political effort and votes that support rational policies to reduce greenhouse gases, the prime cause of climate change, while supporting the development and deployment of renewable and alternative energy production systems and re-industrialization.
I know. Sounds like a fun-reading novel, right?
Of course, writing that has the reader lost in the interplay of characters and situations is different from an essay on the consequences climate change on the insurance underwriter business.
Pattee raises the following:
Perhaps the confusion about what climate fiction can – and should – do is really just a question of the thin line between art and propaganda. While both may look like a book and quack like a book, most of the writers I spoke with described their fiction as an exploration towards an unknown destination. Propaganda, whose goal is persuasion, must know the destination and take the most succinct, least nuanced path to get there. When the label of “climate fiction” is applied to a book, every plot choice and character, starts to be seen as a message about climate change.
Sure, that can happen. In fact, there are a lot of other things that can happen to a novel that makes it fail. It all depends on the writing. The very condition of climate change is a great example of “an exploration towards an unknown destination.” Today, life includes climate change and none of us know exactly the where or when or the what of it, just like every other aspect of life that is considered proper fare for fiction. Hey, if you are going to write about a life in the 14th Century, you better have a damned good device to allow you to ignore the Black Death.
Pattee writes about Weather, a novel by Jenny Offill:
I was standing in my kitchen drinking a glass of water when I picked up Weather, by Jenny Offill, and found myself two hours later, still standing in my kitchen, weeping. How can these books not change…everything?
I think Weather is a jewel of a climate fiction novel (read my comments here, in my post “Climate Fiction Quicky: Weather, by Jenny Offill, is Terrific” This essay’s author answers the primary question of the essay in her description of her reaction to Weather. Climate fiction can be very moving on this, our human level, and being moved in a fundamental way changes a person.
Pattee wonders if the question of climate fiction helping solve climate change is a false dichotomy of savior or sinner, or as she puts it, does climate fiction, if failing to save the world “become like any other topic, a novelty. A plot.” Unfortunately, the either/or device used throughout her essay is only to be unclearly dismissed late in the essay, which ends up not being all that helpful. She quotes El-Akkad on the role of fiction that is not to tell us about the future, but tell us about us, and for El Akkad, this reflectivity is the whole point. “The inherent uncertainty of art is, in many ways, the clearest reflective surface against which we see the human condition,” he says.
Um, yeah. The whole point of climate fiction is in the acknowledgement that climate change is part of the human condition. Sure, there’s plenty of lousy climate fiction, but ever thus with any type of art. Let’s celebrate great climate fiction like Weather and have some faith that any art that addresses climate change and also touches us is probably doing something good.