dizziness
Fiction about climate breakdown, biodiversity loss, ecological crisis and collapse has proliferated in recent years.
These include Barbara Kingsolver’s flight behavior; Jeanne Ofir’s weather; John Lanchester’s wall; Richard Bowles upper floor; Ian McEwan’s solar; Gregory Normington’s Devil’s Road; Amitav Ghosh’s gun island; Kim Stanley Robinson’s future department; and Jesse Greenglass’ Takaya.
Some of these stories I greatly admire and others do not. At its best, fiction can touch both sides of the big hole left in my consciousness by ecosystem collapse and extinction, briefly sending me into a bewildering sense of vertigo.
Also, at its best, it helps me glimpse the lineage more clearly. At worst it can be contrived, worthwhile or argumentative, seeing the death of the living world and the slow collapse of everything we know as just another “problem” to discuss, or just characters The backdrop to the human drama.
narrative
At its best, it raises the right questions, uneases, bears witness and provokes. At worst, it clings to conclusions and easy answers.
I believe that the sprawling sprawl of our time—the Anthropocene, the mass extinction, the sixth mass extinction, the mass extinction, or whatever you want to call it—is too complex and vast for our imaginations to comprehend.
I’ve never bought into the idea that writers fly over the world like drones and can see things other mortals can’t, beyond the limits of all imagination.
Writers are bound by the same inescapable physics as everyone else, breathing the same millionths of CO2, and being buffeted by the same upwinds. Writers are as lost and lost as anyone in this strange weather.
Good fiction, I think, acknowledges this. It won’t get out of trouble. Maybe good fiction writers—and poets, of course—should not fully understand what they’re writing, or know where the story is leading them.
Narratives these days are shaky, their arcs bent and out of shape. As rapidly converging crises overwhelm our certainty, as trophic cascades and positive feedback loops render plot pointless, who knows where the stories we tell ourselves will end?
choose
I’m not saying that fiction and storytelling can’t help us live our lives, or be useful guides through the dark terrain ahead. I believe they can—perhaps they are the only ones who can—if only we admit that our guides are as lost as we are.
A young woman is ready to leave everything she’s known. In the near future, you can choose how you want to be.
Born in a barren, techno-utopian city of machines, she has immigrated and adapted to a peasant lifestyle.
Now she is leaving again, into the wilderness, where the uncut forest lurks beyond the wall, unknown.
dawn. She hovered nervously. A door in the wall opened. In the distance, she glimpsed greenery. Darker than she’d imagined.
Women don’t know what’s going to happen next. I do not know either. But fiction can be a door in that wall. I invite you to do it step by step.
the author
Nick Hunt is the author of four non-fiction books, most recently Quirky: Walking through Europe’s incredible landscapes (John Murray, 2021). His collection of short stories Loss Soup and Other Stories is published by Greenbank Books and is available in the UK through The Dark Mountain Project. tinyurl.com/loss-soup. This article first appeared on latest issue Revival and Ecologists Magazine.
