I read climate fiction—a would-be genre that covers a lot of ground—and I post reviews of such books when I get around to it. What is interesting about these three books is how each handles timelines differently. A Friend of the Earth, by T. C. Boyle, was published in 2000 and has a timeline that extends to 2025, but jumps around into different points in the character’s past. The Forcing, by Paul E. Hardisty, was published in early 2023, and it’s timeline is non-specific, but probably somewhere around 2060-2080, is my guess, ad alternates between the character’s present and the past following a plotline. Altar to an Erupting Sun, by Chuck Collins, is another recently published work, from May, 2023, and this story’s timeline is done as interweaving chapters moves among several periods, but across the main part of the main character’s life, and she doesn’t die young, and that’s not really a spoiler.
Altar to an Erupting Sun, Chuck Collins
Altar to an Erupting Sun, by Chuck Collins, is an interesting book, although at different points it felt slow. As the book drew to a close, though, I realized my sometimes ambivalent reception of the book had been replaced by a solid appreciation for the subject and how that subject had been presented. In other words, I’m very glad to have read this book.
And what is the subject of the book? I’d say it is the history of activism through the perspective of the main character, Rae, who brings us along on her long journey as activist that starts with anti-nuclear power demonstrations in the 1970s within a back-to-the-earth counterculture. The fact that much of the book takes place in Massachusetts and Vermont was a bonus for me, given that the characters are placed within many of the same times and places that I myself have lived.
Activism on climate change and anti-fossil fuels and anti-overconsumption and pro-shared communities are the places where Rae ends up, with the climate change theme front and center. The body of the book takes the reader along her development as an activist, starting in the upper Pioneer Valley in 1973 and ending with a bang in 2023, along with a seven year/multiple chapters epilogue that reflects on the main character’s values and the consequence of those values within the communities she’d been central in establishing in the hope of better and healthy integration of man and the living world. The reason why I could feel the book sometimes seemed slow is because Rae’s journey is described deeply, both in terms of the inspirations for and development of her values over a long timeline. The chapters fluctuate back and forth among various years, a device that can be a bit confusing at times, but overall this is an effectively written structure for building the story. I came away feeling like I know people like the characters in the book, albeit those living are somewhat weaker in their lives and their values than many of the fictional characters. I was left with a the longing to see the consciously-built communal world described in the pages of the book to be found in reality, so there is a bit of a fairytale-like element in this book, but fairytales like this can be instructive.
Like the effort to become a climate activist, getting through this book is a worthwhile journey that will be difficult at times, but then again building a better world is harder than simply wishing for one. My sense of how the world can be has been re-invigorated and my hope has been deepened, and that is a great outcome for the book’s author to achieve.
The Forcing, Paul E. Hardisty
I read this in e-book form and found it a quick read and interesting.
Why interesting? Mainly because the book takes place in the not-so-distant future, where climate change has had its way with the world in most of the usual ways: bad weather, rising temperatures, expansion of inhabitable land, crop failure, migration, sea rise, war. But that’s not the premise that is interesting, but the political and societal reaction in North America, where the fossil fuel interests had had their way in what was called the Repudiation, when all that would-be climate progress was overthrown in favor of business as usual, with a sort of Trump-like reactionary government coming to power. The consequence of that, when the book opens, is that the Repudiation is finally overthrown, because things had gotten much worse, with Canada becoming part of the United States, with wars raging overseas where countries are trying to fight back against Western exploitation, including food shipped back home for American citizens, and now, a youth-led government has come to power and their efforts to address the climate crisis is, step one, to blame the older people.
The story begins in Canada, where the central character and his wife have reached the age that triggers relocation down south into more difficult areas (a largely emptied Texas), and things for those “who will never be forgiven” go from bad to worse to worser yet. The reader knows from the very start that the main character survives, since the form of the book is sections covering the relocation and subsequent developments alternating with sections of the much older man recollecting those times and the long journey that has brought him to his final home.
I enjoyed the book overall, even though the background of the change in governance that judges and defies those old enough to have been able to reduce or avoid catastrophic climate change is not offered in any detail, but instead largely presented as a done deal, but I wish this had been handled with more nuance—it is easy enough to imagine that even the future generation might understand there were and are those from older times who fought the good fight. How a polity transforms to this moral certitude would be more fascinating, but the fanaticism is sufficiently sketched out in the circumstances of the character and his contemporaries as they struggle. The evil reactionary Repudiation (reacting, that is, against efforts to address climate change) is also characterized as flatly as the new political reality, but the writer has to choose his focus, I suppose.
The focus chosen is at the level of the individual and this is executed well, and I experienced a growing engagement with the characters, even if the nagging wonder of how this particular and foundational societal shift could happen kept coming up. Nonetheless, the book is a very readable book of ideas and the ideas are thought-provoking and on-target. This is a cautionary tale and a successful one at that, which is rare enough. Is this how the future generations will think of us? The prosecution of the argument is chilling, especially given our general failure to date to do enough about climate change. Be warned: being a card-carrying Greenie won’t do much for you when the young people have had enough!
A Friend of the Earth, T. C. Boyle
The book is entertaining and, in so far as it addresses climate change, effective enough, despite the 2000 copyright publication date. The structure is that of alternating chapters among a number of timelines in the main character’s life, so the reader is bounced around from the contemporary timeframe to earlier periods (and storylines) in the main character’s life; this kind of structure can be confusing, but the author’s use of dates in the chapter titles proves an easy fix.
His work is often described as dark comedy and A Friend of the Earth certainly fits that bill, and readers may feel less than uplifted by the story, although the writing and the climate change theme of man’s stupidity and voraciousness in relation to the living world positively counters this reader’s typically negative perception, of satire. It helps, too, that the characters are engaging, so the frustration a reader may feel about one or another character’s decisions (I wanted to dope slap the main character, Ty Tierwater, any number of times, for example) is offset by character engagement. T.C. Boyle seems happy enough to roast the devourers of the world and environmentalist alike, and points out the similarities that both classes of people share, including the tendency toward over-consumption. I don’t like dark comedies generally, and this book falls into the category of satire, but the book is very much worth a read. His descriptions of climate change consequences are off a few years (too early and/or too exaggerated), but close enough, especially given that the book came out a baker’s dozen of year ago.