Climate fiction needs to challenge and inspire, say these Canadian authors
Also: Netflix enviro satire Don't Look Up is polarizing - and
popular
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- Climate fiction needs to challenge and inspire, say these Canadian authors
- Netflix's enviro satire Don't Look Up is polarizing — and very popular
- How scientists know the New Year's Day boom over Pittsburgh was an exploding meteor
Climate fiction needs to challenge and inspire, say these Canadian authors
Floods, record-breaking heat waves and forest fires brought climate change close to home for many Canadians in 2021 — and that includes authors, some of whom have begun weaving climate themes into their fiction.
What On Earth host Laura Lynch spoke with three Canadian authors about how fiction can inspire action, and the climate-themed books that have influenced their own work.
Catherine Bush, Blaze Island (2020)
Guelph, Ont., author Catherine Bush begins her latest novel, Blaze Island, with a climate change-induced storm battering an idyllic island off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador. Inspired by Shakespeare's play The Tempest, Bush recasts the character of Prospero the magician as a contemporary climate scientist desperate to protect his daughter, Miranda, from the dangers of a changing climate.
"I believe that storytelling is actually key to our survival as a species," Bush said. "All fiction at its root wants to seduce through story, but also transform through story."
To that end, Bush aims to inspire positive emotions in her readers.
"I think we need more wonder and awe, not just despair and fear," she said. "Wonder and awe and care are what are going to transform us."
Bush said her approach was inspired by Sarah Ray's book A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety. "[Ray] talks about replacing the idea of hope with desire. Hope is a more passive state, whereas desire leads to purpose and action," she said.
Bush's other climate-themed reading recommendations include Darryl Whetter's novel Our Sands and Waubgeshig Rice's Moon of the Crusted Snow.
Premee Mohamed, The Annual Migration of Clouds (2021)
Edmonton author Premee Mohamed's latest novella takes place long after climate disasters have wreaked havoc around the globe. The Annual Migration of Clouds is set on the abandoned University of Alberta campus, where a community of survivors cobbles together an existence as they cope with an incurable disease.
Mohamed said she sees hope for the future in the collective mindset of her characters. As she watched the flooding disasters unfold in British Columbia last November, the power of community became even more apparent to her.
"If I'd been in that situation, I actually wouldn't have been able to evacuate. I don't have a vehicle and, for medical reasons, I'm not supposed to drive," she said. "I would have had to rely on my community to hopefully look after me and get me out of there."
Her publisher, ECW, describes the speculative fiction novella as "hopepunk," a subgenre with optimism at its core.
"Hopepunk is not about unbearable naiveté or optimism that ignores the facts of the world," said Mohamed. Rather, it recognizes the dangers facing humanity and suggests that people can fight back in positive, communal ways.
"I would like to see more characters and more books acknowledging that these terrible problems and the villains and the antagonists and the systemic issues can be solved together, in ways that don't devolve into a bloodbath," she said.
Mohamed suggested Gun Island by Amitav Ghosh as another work of climate-themed fiction.
David Huebert, Chemical Valley (2021)
Halifax author David Huebert named his latest collection of short stories after Chemical Valley, a region in Sarnia, Ont., with a large number of plants and refineries.
Many of Huebert's characters make their living from the petrochemical industry, but also see the impacts of climate change.
"There is a necessity to move beyond the fossil fuel industry," he said. "But I also wanted to think in more complicated ways about the ways that all of our lives are entangled in oil."
Huebert's stories have humour woven through them, something he believes is a helpful way to counter climate dread and anxiety.
"It can also be a way of processing, and a way of turning these feelings on their heads and examining them. And it's certainly one of the ways that we can be together as people."
One of Huebert's influences is the book Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age, in which author Nicole Seymour asks readers to rethink the environmental movement's doom-and-gloom attitude. "I think there's room for more levity in climate change discourse," Huebert said.
His other recommendations for climate literature include Underland by Robert Macfarlane and Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places by Andrew Blackwell.
– Rachel Sanders
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