[This month we celebrate the 150th anniversary of Arbor Day, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of tree-tastic stories. Leading up to a special weekend post on the holiday’s histories!]
On the long
legacy of cli fi, and a stunning recent novel that reveals the genre’s true
potential.
The term “cli
fi” (for “climate fiction”) has only been around for the last 10 years or
so; it was apparently first coined in 2011 by activist
and author Dan Bloom to describe Jim
Laughter’s novel Polar City Red,
and then gradually picked up by various media
voices and stories around 2013-2014. But as with so many literary genres,
there are numerous earlier authors and works that can productively be
classified within this frame, including Jules Verne’s The
Purchase of the North Pole (1889), Laurence Manning’s The Man Who Awoke
(1933), multiple novels
by J.G. Ballard, and Octavia Butler’s Parable
of the Sower (1993) and Parable
of the Talents (1998), among others. While all of those works are
distinct and specific, I’d say that all of them fall under the broad umbrella
of science fiction, wedding as they do their realistic depictions of science
and the natural world to imagined futures in which (generally) worst-case
climate and environmental scenarios have come to pass and humans (individually and/or
collectively) are dealing with the aftermaths.
Sci fi cli fi
(say that five times fast) has continued to be a prominent sub-genre here in
the 21st century, as exemplified particularly clearly by science
fiction legend Kim
Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capitol trilogy (comprising the novels Forty Signs of Rain [2004], Fifty Degrees Below [2005], and Sixty Days and Counting [2007]). But as
we’ve moved further and further into a world where climate change is not an
imagined future scenario but a very, very
real present reality, we’ve concurrently seen authors begin to produce as
well cli fi novels and stories that depict, respond to, and engage in more
socially realistic ways that present world. That list includes, among others,
Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight
Behavior (2012), Sophie Mackintosh’s The
Water Cure (2018), a number of the stories in John Joseph Adams’ edited
anthology Loosed
Upon the World: The Saga Anthology of Climate Fiction (2015), and one
of the most acclaimed and powerful American novels in recent memory, Richard
Powers’ Pulitzer Prize-winning The
Overstory (2018).
Yet in truth, to
classify The Overstory as an example
of more contemporary and/or socially realistic fiction is no more accurate than
to describe it as science fiction. Powers’ book does trace the individual yet
ultimately interconnected stories of nine realistic fictional characters, all
Americans living in our early 21st century moment, all descended
from family and communal histories involving trees in central ways. But through
that shared theme, and through his structural and narrative choices as well,
Powers ultimately produces a work that I would call a historical novel in which
the history (as well as the present and future) of the world is viewed through
the lens of trees and forests, rather than through the perspectives or
experiences of humans (individual or collective, fictional or real). Which is
to say, Powers’ first cli fi novel (his latest, 2021’s
Bewilderment, has been described that
way as well, but I haven’t had the chance to read it) isn’t just about climate
change or environmentalism—it makes the environment, and specifically trees,
its main character, main narrative perspective, and ultimately main emphasis,
above (in every sense) and beyond us transient humans.
Next tree tale
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other tree texts you’d throw in?
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