Our House, Our Fire, our Fiction

“I want you to act as you would in a crisis,” the 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg told Davos. “I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.”

When a kid in pigtails speaks truth to power, the world listens.
At a time when the science could not be clearer, Thunberg’s burning house metaphor turned her appearance at Davos into an iconic moment in climate history.

Our house on fire: an image everyone on the planet can understand. Our, implies an us: a community or family. House implies a home, and shelter. Fire spells danger. Instantly, a mental narrative is triggered, leading to three choices.

Choice One entails pretending there is no fire, or that there is one, but it is a containable household accident. Choice Two involves doing one’s best to douse the flames and limit the damage. Choice Three offers the simplest solution to the crisis: run.

But where to?

Thunberg’s simple, evocative metaphor mobilized millions around the world: proof, if ever it were needed, of the impact language can have. As the novelist Margaret Atwood once put it, “A word after a word after a word is power.”

If climate change challenges the imagination by demanding that we re-frame our relationship to the entire world, then that shift of perception calls for powerful new stories, and powerful new ways of telling them.

So, since we are famously a storytelling species, how have the fiction writers of the Anthropocene tackled the rolling catastrophe of a world heading for four degrees of warming in the lifetime of any baby born today?

With shocking inadequacy, according to Amitav Ghosh, who in his 2016 lecture series and book The Great Derangement argued that literary fiction had been slow to address the issue upon which the survival of our ecosystem depends.  “It’s our job, as writers, to make imaginative leaps on behalf of those who don’t, can’t or won’t,” he admonished.

So why weren’t we doing that job? Why couldn’t we acknowledge the elephant in the room? In part because the “inconvenient truth” of climate change and the likely consequences of runaway global warming were too huge, to horrifying and too complex to take in: they were quite literally “unimaginable”. So, lacking the mental apparatus to convey the temporal scale and the complexity of the crisis, we looked the other way and wrote about anything and everything else. Future readers, Ghosh contended, would look back on our era and “conclude that ours was a time when most forms of art and literature….prevented people from recognizing the realities of their plight.”

Ghosh (whose novel The Hungry Tide addresses the social and political repercussions of catastrophic flooding) cited notable exceptions to his criticism including Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 The Road, Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and Ian McEwan’s Solar. But there was pushback: many accused Ghosh of ignoring science fiction and young adult fiction, which had been tackling climate change and ecocide for years: had Ghosh read the ground-breaking works of Kim Stanley Robinson, many argued, he might have muted his complaint. Yet his point remained a salient one that resonated not just with climate scientists, activists and the reading public but with Ghosh’s main target audience: other writers.

And what a difference three years makes.

Since Ghosh issued his challenge to world literature, the tide has turned: the Chinese curse ‘may you live in interesting times’ has found its moment, and the moment has found its genre: cli-fi. Ghosh’s next novel Gun Island (published later this year) joins a veritable ocean of literature rising to the occasion of our times, while older works such as Maggie Gee’s startlingly prophetic 1998 novel The Ice People are being rediscovered, thanks in part to the increasing surge in interest in the planet’s predicament, and the fictions it engenders.

The man who coined the term cli-fi, Dan Bloom, is a 70-year-old American climate activist who has not boarded a flight since 1996. Since he doesn’t own so much as a laptop, he spends his days in an internet café near his home in Chiayi in southern Taiwan, raging against the stupidity of the not-clever-enough ape– and campaigning to get cli-fi firmly established in the lexicon, pausing only when a typhoon blows in and scuppers his connection. He thinks we are doomed, and likes to quote the environmentalists’ joke:

Two planets meet in space. One is green and blue and healthy; the other is pale and grey and sick.

The healthy planet looks at the sick one sand says. “Oh, I had that disease once. It’s called Mankind. But don’t worry: it goes away all by itself.”

Dan contends that we have always created – and indeed reveled in – apocalyptic narratives: the Bible is bursting at the seams with floods, plagues, storms of locusts and other signs of God’s mighty wrath. The theme of judgement and punishment is a particularly resonant one in movies such as The Day After Tomorrow, Mad Max:Fury Road and Snowpiercer.

Climate disaster movies operate on a scale that reflects the extremity of our accelerating times: hyperactive narratives in which humans must struggle to survive the wrath of what Nature (Mon dieu, did we once call her Mother?) has become. Post-disaster scenarios paint a more elegiac picture of a Lost Eden: while Wall-E mourns a planet converted into a titanic trash-heap, Beasts of the Southern Wild imagines a waterlogged delta community in which humans must re-invent themselves, their myths, and their relationship to nature if they are to survive.

In storytelling terms, Apocalypses are seductive – and inevitably extreme. While many supporters of voluntary human extinction –Dan Bloom among them – warn that Homo Sapiens is an infestation which will wreck the planet unless we remove ourselves from the equation, some 50 million Americans believe in a religious event called the Rapture in which, come Doomsday, the pure in heart will be airlifted to heaven while the sinners will remain on Earth suffering the consequences of their depravity. The roaring success of the Left Behind novels of Tim LaHaye and Jerry B Jenkins testifies to the traction of the judgement theme among believers. But while Extinctionists, the Rapture-ready and the billionaire would-be colonizers of Mars dwell on scenarios on the outer fringes of the imaginable, somewhere in the middle lies the main story.

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,” wrote EM Forster. This may be true, but as foreign countries go, humankind’s shared past is so plentiful in maps, documents, films, art, history books, and living memory that it is not actually difficult to visualize: most of the heavy lifting has been done for us. Imagining the future has always been a trickier matter: a niche preoccupation of Research and Development teams, planners, futurologists, scientists and Sci-fi writers. But now that many of yesterday’s direst scientific predictions have come measurably true – in the form of melting glaciers and ice-caps, bleached coral reefs, warmer oceans, unprecedented species extinction, extreme weather events, disappearing shorelines and destabilized seasons, the future has become easier to picture. Indeed, we can take a highly educated guess at what it will resemble: a faster-moving, uncannier and more furious version of the present.

In this context, climate fiction is becoming the new realism.

And it is evolving fast.

Jeff Vandermeer’s beautiful, chilling Southern Reach trilogy (the first volume of which, Annihilation, became a haunting film), explores the notion of the natural world developing a hive mind with its own colonizing agenda. Meanwhile Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140, whose huge cast of characters duck, dive and thrive in the semi-drowned metropolis, has been hailed as a pioneer of the emerging sub-genre Solarpunk, which celebrates the notion that whatever fine mess we have gotten us into, our ingenuity and adaptability might just see us through.

While post-apocalyptic landscapes vary dramatically according to local geography, two of its most enduring props are the shopping trolley and the shipping container: the displaced person’s equivalent of the vehicle and the dwelling. Today’s shopping trolley symbolizes the abundance of the globalized world: as capitalism’s hunter-gatherers we search the aisles for bargains, collecting avocados from Israel, mangoes from Peru, coffee from Ethiopia, plastic houseware from China, or home-produced meat from Europe’s second biggest pork exporter, Danish Crown. In the climate-altered world of a fictional tomorrow the trolley’s purpose is a simpler one: as a means of transporting the few possessions you have left. Meanwhile the shipping container, today the iconic symbol of global movement, becomes its opposite: a sign of stasis. In Omaar El Akkad’s American War, the metal boxes are the only homes that the vast communities of refugees and the internally displaced will know.

Much cli-fi is inevitably preoccupied with water: not enough of it, or too much. Rising seas are the backdrops in Sophie Mackintosh’s unsettling dystopia The Water Cure, Paolo Bacigalupi’s Drowned Cities and the inundated New York of Nathaniel Rich’s Odds Against Tomorrow. Given that, it is perhaps surprising that a country as pancake-flat as Denmark has not spawned more flood and Ark narratives. Exceptions are the brilliant, but oddly overlooked 2018 movie Qeta, set in a semi-submerged Copenhagen, while Hanne Richardt Beck’s novel 7 Sydøst contemplates the societal conflicts triggered by flooding and an influx of refugees.

Britain is far from flat, but that does not stop the distinguished writer John Lanchester from flooding its shores in The Wall, his first foray into climate fiction. Part philosophical meditation on social control and inequality, part gripping thriller, the ethical issues it raises distinguish it as a landmark text of the genre. Set in the near-future which JG Ballard liked to call “five minutes from now” in the wake of an event referred to simply as the Change, the Wall of the title encloses a territory that could equally be Denmark, or any other nation with a coastline. Lanchester deftly sketches the architecture of a Europe in which rapid sea level rise has devoured the shores in the space of a mere generation, while the disruption of the Gulf Stream has brought on freezing temperatures.

Lanchester’s young protagonist, Kavanagh, is on his first compulsory tour of duty defending The Wall whose primary purpose is not as a buffer against the sea, but as a deterrent to the desperate “Others” seeking refuge. Patrolling the Wall is a cold, harsh life, and one that the Defenders must endure in order to ensure their future rights at citizens. But there is a further, more brutal equation, which puts lives at stake: for every Other who breaches the Wall, a Defender will be cast out to sea.

“We were used to feeling frightened of them, hostile to them: if they came here, we would kill them. It was that simple, “ says Kavanagh. “No hard feelings, the living and the dead, more in common than you might think; a tiny bit of luck here and there dividing them, taking turns to live, taking turns to die; all in the same boat. All the same really. Others. Defenders – what’s the difference? I couldn’t decide if this was the opposite of what it would be like to fight to the death, or a good preparation for it.”

In light of the isolationism of the militant Brexiteers, of Trump’s vote-catching plans for an anti-Mexican Wall, and the anti-immigrant policies of Inger Støjbjerg, Lanchester’s novel hits a nerve that is so of-the-moment it hurts. Equally timely is its unflinching portrayal of the radical inequality that exists between the generations, already in evidence today. In The Wall, thanks to the Change, parent-child relationships are irredeemably poisoned by resentment and blame.

“None of us can talk to our parents,” reports Kavanagh. “By ‘us’ I mean my generation, people born after the Change….The old feel they irretrievably fucked up the world, then allowed us to be born into it. And you know what? It’s true. That’s exactly what they did. They know it, we know it. Everybody knows it.” 

While Kavanagh and his peers despise the older generation, he does not question the social hierarchies of the world he has inherited. As one character puts it. “There was our parents’ world, and now there is our world.”

“Our world” consists of three social strata: the Elites, who fly in the planes Kavanagh sees crossing the sky, and make the decisions; the regular citizens who must serve time as Defenders; and the Help. These are Others who made it over the Wall and have been offered the choice of being “euthanized”, cast back out to sea, or remaining on land in exchange for a lifetime of unpaid work. Deftly, Lanchester plants the notion of a slave state without ever using the word ‘slave’: by presenting slavery as a simple fact of life, Lanchester triggers a queasy cognitive dissonance whereby on the one hand the reader feels horrified, and on the other shares Kavanagh’s guilty satisfaction when on a camping trip, the loaned Help erect the tents, cooks the meals and carries the luggage.

But the future Britain’s Help also serve another, darker purpose. Since most young people resist becoming Breeders, given the bleakness of the world they will inherit, and since there are not enough babies being born to sustain the population, the Help are allowed to have children, who will become regular citizens – but they must relinquish them. “You see the kids all around the place, often with older parents, or parents who are a visibly different ethnicity from their children,” reports Kavanagh with characteristic matter-of-factness.

It is an astute move on Lanchester’s part to make Kavanagh an Everyman figure: apolitical, unquestioning of the status quo, and prepared, when a Big Question appears on the horizon, to shrug his shoulders and settle for the monosyllabic non-answer “just because.” Even when the story takes a shocking turn, and Kavanagh finds himself and other Defenders cast out to sea, Lanchester leaves to the reader to guess whether his protagonist’s sense of injustice will awaken, or whether it will be trumped by the instinct to survive, no matter what the moral cost.

Like Greta Thunberg’s burning house, The Wall conveys what Martin Luther King once called “the fierce urgency of now” with eloquence and panache, while intelligently exploring some of the challenges and ethical dilemmas and injustices that the planet’s youngest humans have already begun to face.

Historians will look back on this era and note its defining paradox: that while the public imagination was increasingly occupied with the dangers ahead, those in power were either in active denial, busy plotting how best to profit from a range of oncoming disasters, indifferent, or – at best – doing far too little, far too late.

But those same historians may also note that today´s storytellers, inspired by solid science and the evidence of their own eyes, have begun to reclaim the power of the prophets and seers of past ages by resuming their almost forgotten role as the cognitive avant-garde. And that collectively, they bear a message that the world ignores at its peril.

This article was originally published in the Danish newspaper Information.