A few weeks ago, a fiction-writer friend told me that her agent invited her to send them any kind of work she wanted, provided it was not climate fiction. “It’s all I’m getting,” the agent told her, “and nobody wants to read it!”
Which, if you think about it, is a good analogy for the climate crisis: the climate is only getting wonkier & more dramatic, but nobody wants to hear about it. Clearly the writers of climate fiction want to hear – and think – about it, even if readers do not. One possible explanation for this mismatch is that a lot of fiction writers simply have no sense of their market; I expect this explains most of it. But still, why would novelists want to think about climate change any more than anybody else? Well, writers tend to be thinkin’ folks. I’d flatter ourselves to think we’re more thoughtful than the general population, although that’s not saying much in my country, which is the most reliably thoughtless on the surface of the earth. Still, you kind of have to think, in order to write anything interesting – and somehow or other, it needs to be in touch with everyday lived reality in order to matter, regardless of how imaginative or imaginary it is. Admittedly, though, some writers become immensely successful by not thinking, but by following a formula. And those folks tend to be the ones who hit the mass-market bestseller lists. Readers, themselves an endangered breed, are probably more representative of the general population: they don’t want to hear about climate change any more than non-readers do. People turn to fiction – esp. “genre” fiction – as entertainment, even escapist entertainment, and we are all comforted by the familiar, the repetitive, the routine. It’s fine to consider a scenario in which alien spacecraft are attacking the earth, because, so far as anybody knows, that’s not super-likely anytime soon. Climate disaster, however, is already upon us, in a big way. So nobody reads the news, either. None of this bodes well for literature as “a vehicle for social change,” as the phrase is. And maybe that’s just as well: if people are not willing to use their mentality and face up to reality, then why ruin their lives for them, while they can still pretend things are normal? Why unplug them from the Matrix if they don’t want to be unplugged?* And surely there’s plenty to write about besides depressing stuff. Alas, all this sounds far too utilitarian for anybody who takes up literature as a vocation, which is one of the least utilitarian things one can do. I write because I can’t help myself. If I had any sense, I’d learn to repair air conditioning systems – there’s going to be plenty of demand for that in the coming decades. Even wildly successful fiction writers take teaching jobs for the health insurance. Even handsome advances and royalties just don’t cover the bills, long term. In the meantime, the people who write cli-fi or cli-po or whatever will read one another’s work – not, it may be, as a mass-market paperback, but maybe as a free PDF (preferably an encrypted free PDF). It may feel a lot like wearing Special Glasses that make everything look green – or brown or gray. But a lot of writers during the Depression wrote about the Depression – it was hard to think about much else, because it was so all-encompassing. It was scary to the point that they thought something had to give. Likewise, to some of us, the massive alteration of the environment in which we live and move and have our being is kind of hard to ignore for more than a few hours at a time. And if those of us who write about the era of Climate Collapse scare ourselves or one another enough, maybe we’ll actually meet in person, in the streets. Maybe, like tomorrow, high noon. ----------- * Literary critics are another matter: they study & teach distressing “political” literature about subversion of oppression and struggles against capitalism as a surrogate for actually participating in struggles against capitalism or in movements to subvert oppression – none of which you can put on your c.v. If you’re trying to do political organizing, don’t waste time trying to mobilize academic literary critics – they’re way too busy.
2 Comments
Amanda M Hemmingsen
9/19/2019 02:59:16 pm
An eloquent exploration of the junctures of many themes. I feel that I struggle with this just in my day-to-day in terms of bringing up what's on my mind about politics and the environment.
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Joe Harrington
9/19/2019 03:44:00 pm
Thanks, Amanda, for the comment! There are indeed thoughtful folks everywhere. And hopefully their thoughtfulness will prompt them to walk out of class or walk off the job at noon tomorrow. Or just stay put and stop buying shit. We shall see. Thanks again!
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June 2021
Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |