At its best, SF grapples with big ideas such as humanity’s place in the cosmos and our role as reshapers of landscapes, ecosystems, the climate, and potentially other worlds.

At its best, SF grapples with big ideas such as humanity’s place in the cosmos and our role as reshapers of landscapes, ecosystems, the climate, and potentially other worlds. As our culture changes, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves also changes. I’m a cartoonist, an artist and a storyteller. I have to believe that our stories matter and can shape how we behave–otherwise what’s the point in creating them? They’re mirrors we hold up to ourselves. Or perhaps a scrying glass, trying to catch a glimpse of our possibilities.

Panels from Captain Marvel #30, written and pencilled by Jim Starlin, inked by Al Milgrom, and lettered by Tom Orzechowski.

I’ve been reading about climate change lately and grappling with despair for our future. If you’re concerned about this also, I highly recommend This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate by Naomi Klein. The book is very bleak and depressing but also offers hope and ways in which we can act, which is what I struggle with most. I try to buy green products, recycle, and buy used as much as possible, but I know I’m not doing enough. I drive my car to work everyday (although I took the bus a lot before we had a kid). I fly a few times a year. Ironically becoming a parent has made me more wasteful while also making me more concerned about the future. Klein rightly points out that this isn’t a problem one individual can solve and that guilt won’t fix it. People shouldn’t be forced to sacrifice while governments, militaries, and corporations are profligate with their carbon budgets. In her book, Klein describes how government legislation and infrastructure investment can manage a just transition to a low-carbon economy based on local control of renewable power generation, funded by taking the outrageous profits of oil companies in a settlement similar to that against tobacco companies.

Matrix Revealed Core Sample Sculpture by Julienne Dolphin Wilding. Photo by Mick Garratt.

Another book that I’ve found really fascinating is Deep Future by Curt Stager, a paleoecologist. A lot of news stories about climate change talk about what will happen by the year 2100. It’s not surprising that the short attention span of the news cycle focuses on this century but our greenhouse gas emissions will persist for much longer than that. Stager talks about how our climate will likely change over the next 100,000 years, looking at climate models and geological history via mud and ice cores for answers. The problem isn’t that climate change will destroy the earth and render it inhabitable for all life. The problem is that climate change will transform the world from the clement environment we have evolved in to a very different world with redrawn geography, less diverse ecosystems, and new realms of geopolitical conflicts. And then eventually (although the timescales are vastly different depending on how much fossil fuels we burn) the world will reach a peak of carbon concentrations in the atmosphere and began to cool, rearranging coastlines and disrupting far future civilizations again as glaciers return.
These books are nonfiction but they also tell stories, stories about our possible futures and what we can do to change them. To me, the most important part of Deep Future isn’t the discussion of how marine life will be affected and the future coastline of an ice-free Greenland–the most important part is Stager’s call for us to not just consider how our actions are going to affect our peers and our children and grandchildren, but to consider people thousands of years hence. This is something that reading SF routinely forces us to contemplate. An early example is the groundbreaking book (I can’t honestly call it a novel, since it has no characters–it’s pure speculative future history) Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon. This book was published in 1930 and his predictions for the near future are very wrong but, as the book progresses, its scope widens to millions and millions of years. From the perspective of an all-seeing eye looking down on the solar system, you watch as humanity almost wipes itself out time after time and genetically modifies itself beyond recognition. The science is not congruent with our current understanding but the vision is unparalleled. When I read a Jim Starlin comic, this is what I assume he means by Captain Marvel’s cosmic consciousness.

Cover by Jim Starlin and Daina Graziunas. Starlin may have been thinking of Stapledon when he gave Captain Marvel cosmic consciousness. He drew this cover for Stapledon’s early work.

Although Last and First Men is cosmic in scope, it never grants humanity a truly cosmic perspective. Utopias come and pass, replaced with genocidal barbarism. Or technologically advanced humans wipe our native life on other worlds to take them over. It doesn’t show us how to make peace with our world, how to live sustainably with limits.
Some SF with a long-term view even celebrates how humanity can violently conquer the world and praises the extractivist mindset. An example is Fury by Henry Kuttner, in uncredited collaboration with his wife CL Moore. This novel, serialized in a pulp magazine in 1947 and published as a book in 1950, is set on lush, verdant Venus. Unfortunately most of the lifeforms are so deadly that people live in underwater cities, having fled to Venus after somehow making Earth uninhabitable. The mortal masses are ruled by decadent immortals. The novel describes humanity as weak, living in stability and comfort underwater out of fear. The solution to this is the protagonist Sam Reed, a man who is so angry at being mortal when the possibility of being immortal exists that he upends the whole system through deceit and violence, driving humanity to destroy every single form of native Venusian life so they can live on the surface. The novel portrays Sam Reed as an evil fascist who is also necessary to keep humanity moving towards our cosmic destiny of an interstellar civilization. It’s manifest destiny written on the galactic plane. Reed is a great character, his emotions are very compelling and the plot is propulsive. Ironically the most interesting scenes in the book are the depictions of Venusian predators that use addictive chemicals and illusions to ensnare their prey. But at the same time the underlying message of this story is horrific. Instead of learning from humanity’s mistake and trying to live with Venusian ecosystems or, even better, taking responsibility and trying to repair the Earth with technology, we instead wipe out all life on another planet. Fury is an example of how SF can tell us a destructive story about our place in the cosmos.

Cover by Larry Kresek.

I’ve always believed, like Sam Reed in Fury, that the survival of our species on the scale of millions of years depends on establishing colonies in space, whether it’s underground bunkers on the Moon and Mars or hollowed-out asteroids like in Zebrowski’s Macrolife: A Mobile Utopia, another book that takes the long view. But before we can create miniature self-sufficient ecosystems in space, we have to learn how to sustain our global ecosystem on Earth. When we consider our place in the cosmos to be the conqueror, mastering nature and the harshness of space through technology without considering the truly long-term consequences, we are telling ourselves the same story that the leaders of oil and mining companies do. But SF can provide us with other visions, other ways of relating to and seeing our place in the cosmos.
One contemporary author who deals directly with climate change, capitalism, sustainability, and conservation is Kim Stanley Robinson. I’ve read his Mars trilogy and 2312, and while I don’t always love his characterization or dialogue, I love his ideas. The three books of the Mars trilogy are Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars, and as you can tell from the titles, they portray a future history in which human colonists terraform Mars in the 21st through 23rd centuries, turning it green and capable of nurturing Earth life and then bulking up the atmosphere with greenhouse gases to melt the permafrost and fill depressions with oceans. But this isn’t a simple tale of human triumph over inert nature. Robinson spends a lot of time describing the alien sublimity of cold, lifeless Mars, and includes a faction in Martian politics that wants to keep Mars red. He also explores alternatives to corporate capitalism, including socialism and new hybrids.

Cover by Rick Sternbach.

As Klein expounds upon in This Changes Everything, the capitalist goal of extracting resources to fuel ever-increasing profits has led us to our current carbon crisis. Part of her solution to climate change is to develop a post-capitalist society where corporate profits are constrained by their environmental impact and the profits of polluters are used to pay for new, renewable-powered infrastructure that is controlled locally. But, to quote Frederic Jameson, “someone once said it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” There are lots of SF stories that tell us how we will destroy the world, and often I fear that we will destroy our civilization rather than give up on capitalism. Robinson addresses this directly in 2312:

“the space diaspora occurred as late capitalism writhed in its internal decision concerning whether to destroy Earth’s biosphere or change its rules. Many argued for the destruction of the biosphere, as being the lesser of two evils”–Pages 124-125 of 2312

One of the main conflicts in Robinson’s solar-system-spanning civilization, which builds on the ideas of his Mars trilogy, is the tension between the cannibalistic corporations on Earth and the more egalitarian societies in space. New York City is flooded but still inhabited, a new Venice, and the Earth is filled with disaster zones. Mars is a planet-wide social democracy. But the true alternative to capitalism is the network between the asteroids and other habitats on planets and moons, called the Mondragon. It is an extension of the model of scientific research stations like McMurdo station on Antarctica and the International Space Station, where government provides for the needs of the people. In the Mondragon economic model, an artificial intelligence on a supercomputer controls the command economy. Each habitat’s needs are defined through a messy political process, then the program manages the production of the settlements to fulfill and distribute these needs. Capitalism is relegated to a regulated margin–creating excess wealth is regarded as a game or an art form. But it can’t strand communities in poverty and pollute the environment.
The Scottish SF writer Iain M Banks and the Welsh author Alastair Reynolds take leftist ideas even further in their novels. Banks’ Culture, an interstellar civilization of anarchic humanoids, who live for pleasure and the pursuit of their own meaning, is ruled by advanced AI just like the Mondragon in 2312. Automation has freed people from work. In Reynolds Revelation Space far future series, the Demarchists govern themselves through a system of democratic anarchy, or Demarchy. A cybernetic brain implant allows for all citizens to be instantly polled on any decision the government makes. Because there are so many decisions made in a minute, this voting process becomes a subconscious response for all but the most major issues. Representative democracy, which can all too often be corrupted by plutocrats, is replaced by absolutely direct democracy. In all these SF novels, technology is essential to our liberation. I don’t think Klein would agree with that. She spends a couple of chapters in This Changes Everything decrying technocratic solutions to climate change. But just as technology has brought us to this juncture, it can be part of our path to a more just future.

Painting by Rick Guidice for NASA.

In many ways 2312 is idealistic but reading it makes me hopeful. Humanity recognizes that we alter nature and that, because of that, we need to consciously be good stewards and use technology to support and extend natural systems. Like in Macrolife, more people live in asteroid habitats than on planets. Each asteroid is a carefully crafted ecosystem called a terrarium. One thing we must keep in mind as we transform our Earth with industrial processes that there is no ideal Eden that we can preserve or recreate. Species and environments are always evolving and people are a part of nature too. Robinson discusses this idea when he catalogues the various ecosystems on the asteroids, some wholly imagined, others based on Earth ecosystems, but all artifacts of human engineering. As humans radically change our world the distinction between natural and artificial environments loses all meaning. We cannot return to an imagined prelapsarian state of complete harmony with our environments. But we can work to change our society and our technology to prioritize sustainability over profitability. And SF can provide us with inspiration and ideas for how to make that possible.

ERIK JENSEN, EDITOR OF SATURDAY PAPER IN AUSTRALIA, REVIEWS JANE ABBOTT'S ''watershed'' WITH THUMBS UP RAVE

Books review IN sAturDay paper IN australia

 

REVIEWED BY EDITOR eRIK O. jENSEN

Jun 4, 2016
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJ1e2Nb8Mig

Watershed

SMH review also very good

http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/jane-abbotts-watershed-describes-a-mean-waterless-world-20160524-go9wq6.html

A NOVEL BY Jane Abbott


Jane Abbott, debut author of dystopian novel Watershed. Photo: Simon Shluter


Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/jane-abbotts-watershed-describes-a-mean-waterless-world-20160524-go9wq6.html#ixzz4AffCaAnm
Follow us: @smh on Twitter | sydneymorningherald on Facebook

 

Reviewer: EDITOR eRIK O. jENSEN

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Jane Abbott’s novel Watershed proposes a future climate change scenario that even the most pessimistic climatologist might hesitate to predict. The oceans haven’t just risen, they’ve inundated, drowning the old world beneath violent, debris-filled waves. The rains have ceased, at least on land where they’re needed, and most of the plants and animals are long dead. The land has become a sea of dust, and the scarcity of water means it has become the currency of choice among survivors.

Watershed is a Mad Max-esque post-apocalyptic thriller where violence, or the threat of it, underpins almost every human interaction and everyone is at least a little mad. The protagonist, Jem, was born in the years after society’s collapse and raised by grandparents Sarah and Daniel, who remember the old world and cling to its moral codes, despite the fact that brutal self-interest is now the order of the day. Sarah and Daniel’s past is told in alternating chapters with Jem’s present, filling in Jem’s backstory and providing, in very broad strokes, the history of the collapse and its immediate aftermath.

....

Watershed’s cover design hints that the novel’s publisher is perhaps hoping to align this novel with Hugh Howey’s blockbuster Silo series, which also features a post-apocalyptic world controlled by a shadowy cabal of tyrants, restricting the flow of information in order to rule a makeshift society with an iron fist.

One of the appeals of post-apocalyptic fiction is in imagining how you, the reader, would cope in the specific scenario presented. Would you find reserves of ingenuity and strength you never knew existed? Or would you throw in your lot with the sadistic cannibals skulking in the hills, picking off unwary survivors? This question ariseS while reading Watershed. If you were condemned to the relentlessly brutal Watershed version of the post-apocalyptic world, you’d probably fill your pockets with rocks and stroll happily into the ocean without a backwards look.

....
We may not really expect, or even want, a thriller to delve deeply into the long-term psychological consequences of living in a society where violence and rape are the norm, but we do expect a thriller to thrill. And here Watershed deliverS. The central mystery is interesting, and the characters are WELL DRAWN.

When it comes to descriptive prose, Abbott’s writing is tight and fluid, well suited to the genre. Aspects of the post-apocalyptic world-building are also evocative; the image of the drowned cities, visible from the shoreline, slowly disintegrating into the swollen ocean, is beautiful and poignant.

A homegrown, post climate-apocalypse thriller LIKE THIS IS a welcome addition to the burgeoning genre of climate-change speculative fiction (or “cli-fi”).

Other Australian authors such as Jane Rawson and James Bradley have already produced some excellent works of literary cli-fi. Watershed IS a provocative vision of a post-apocalyptic world and a compelling action thriller.  -- EDITOR eRIK O. jENSEN

Vintage, 528pp, $32.99

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Jane Abbott Watershed

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Reviewer: EDITOR eRIK O. jENSEN

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Ashley Chappo on "The Imaginary Arctic" for World Policy Journal

The Imaginary Arctic

June 1, 2016

By Ashley Chappo

What is it about the Arctic that inspires such human flights of fancy?

For the past several hundred years, writers and artists have turned to the region in their work, creating fictional and imaginative realms vastly different from the true Arctic.

Perhaps the most well known of these daydreams was the tale told by Mary Shelley about a man-made monster, “gigantic in stature, yet uncouth and distorted in its proportions,” born from an unsanctioned scientific experiment and the subject of the widely popular cli-fi novel Frankenstein. Shelley chose the Arctic as a backdrop for her horror story, with themes aided by its ice, snow, and starkness.
Her gothic novel begins by framing the story through the tale of explorer Captain Robert Walton, who ventures to the Arctic in pursuit of the North Pole. But along his journey, Walton first encounters a giant figure aboard a dog sled, followed by an emaciated, forlorn scientist named Victor Frankenstein, later revealed as the creator of the monster.
Mary Shelley published Frankenstein in 1818, at the height of exploration for the Northwest Passage and almost 40 years after explorers had first ventured beyond the Arctic Circle. But explorers would only reach the North Pole nearly 100 years later after multiple failed attempts.
At the time, the Arctic was still largely unknown in Europe and America, which led writers and artists like Shelley to imagine the Far North in ways that best captured its sense of wonder and mystery. Today, these fictional conceptualizations have lingered, transcending the human imagination and informing visions of an otherwise largely unknown region.
“Do you understand this feeling? This breeze, which has traveled from the regions towards which I am advancing, gives me a foretaste of those icy climes,” writes Walton in a letter to his sister at the beginning of the novel. “Inspirited by this wind of promise, my daydreams become more fervent and vivid.”
In Shelley’s fictional realm, the Arctic becomes both the home to the monster but also, as evidenced by Walton, a paradisal region of pristine, untouched desires.
“I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and desolation; it ever presents itself to my imagination as the region of beauty and delight,” writes Walton. “There, Margaret, the sun is forever visible, its broad disk just skirting the horizon and diffusing a perpetual splendour.”
In these creations, we witness Arctic mythmaking, in effect, the blossoming of human fantasies about a region known for its long periods of near-constant night or light.
Jack London constructs the same myth building in his famous novels, White Fang, published in 1906, and Call of the Wild, published in 1903, set in the Yukon Territory. In his case, London captures a violent human and animalistic struggle on what is seen as the world’s last frontier. But, even in his narratives the setting of the Arctic is given to extremes, presented as a largely untamed and otherworldly environment.
These Northern myths are even extended in literary fiction for young people. Take the His Dark Materials series by Phillip Pullman, published in 1995, or The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis, first published in 1950, both widely popularized by blockbuster movies for kids. In the book Northern Lights, the first in the His Dark Materials series for which Pullman won the Carnegie Medal, the primary character Lyra Belacqua ventures to the Arctic to rescue her friend Roger Parslow. In that story, the region is presented as an isolated, mystical place where evil roams in ungodly experiments, with people even riding armed polar bears. The Arctic in this story is magical, not real, just as it is in many fictional presentations.
The most volatile of these myths views the Arctic as a pristine environment, untouched by the outside world. This could not be further from the truth. Today, the Arctic, while beautiful, could hardly be called pristine. In fact, the Arctic has become home to some of the harshest effects of climate change and influences of pollution, including plastics.
When the Arctic Council was created in 1996 one of the founding purposes was environmental protection. In fact, the passage of the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy in Rovaneimi, Finland, in 1991 was the first non-binding environmental protection agreement among the eight Arctic nations, developed as the region’s leaders recognized the increased need for multilateral action in concert with international cooperation.
Back in 1991, the Arctic nations united around the call for increased cooperation, in part as a result of fears about the deteriorating Arctic environment. To begin with, there had been well-reported scientific evidence of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) and heavy metals turning up in the Arctic, according to the Arctic Council. These POPs and metals were making their way into the food sources of indigenous people. There had also been reports that the Soviet Union had dumped radioactive materials in the region, as a consequence of limited regulation or rule setting in the region.
It was only in 1996 that the Arctic Council was declared a consensus forum to increase cooperation between the eight Arctic states with the inclusion of the regions indigenous peoples’ organizations. In this vein, five initiatives were created: the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program, the Conservation of Arctic Flora and Fauna program; the Protection of the Arctic Marine Environment working group; the Emergency Prevention, Preparedness, and Response working group; and the Sustainable Development and Utilization program.
Today, new efforts to address sustainable development and environmental protection are being made, such as the establishment of the Task Force on Arctic Marine Cooperation in 2015 to assess increased cooperation in Arctic marine areas. Yet even as the Arctic Council takes well-intended steps in this direction, certain misconceptions about the Arctic region persist, leaving sustainable development and environmental progress stunted.
The view of the Arctic as a remote and untouched region, a concept that is accepted and even embraced by the unknowing, has provided a single-minded analysis of the region as a resource-rich, untapped zone. In fact, over 500,000 of the Arctic’s 4 million inhabitants are indigenous. Their ancestors have lived in the region and utilized its resources for centuries, and today these communities are dealing with major environmental changes. Given this reality, policy setting must be done with an emphasis on local, indigenous voices, not only through increased representation of the Permanent Participants at the Arctic Council, but also through increased local environmental observation.

Indigenous people of the Arctic have continued to express concerns that they are being excluded from multilateral environmental discussions within regional forums, such as the Arctic Council—a point that was raised at World Policy Institute’s jointly held Arctic workshop in Washington, D.C. Indigenous homelands are under increased pressure as the effects of climate change are felt in the Arctic region at alarming rates, threatening food sources and ways of life.
The idea that the Arctic needs to be tamed is introduced by literary tropes and reflected in myths that fail to include the original inhabitants of the region. A more profound effort to include and support indigenous people in the Arctic will lead to more productive action on environmental issues, with those who are most affected by climate change taking a leading role in combating its effects.
Permanent Participants—the status of indigenous peoples’ organizations in the Arctic Council—cannot currently vote when the Council makes decisions, as that right is limited to national governments. They are able to exert influence during the decision-making and policy-forming processes, but their role could be expanded. This would involve improving relationships with Arctic states, providing equal support for all six Permanent Participant organizations, and ultimately expanding the resources at their disposal.
The Arctic will certainly continue to be a p
layground for humankind’s wildest imaginations, but we should all take note to dispel the fact from the fiction, at least when it comes to policy decisions.

*****

*****

Ashley Chappo is an editorial assistant at World Policy Journal.

UMASS, Louisiana State University and over 25 other colleges and universities offering ''cli-fi'' classes this fall 2016 semester

''Cli-fi'' is coming to be seen more and more as more than just a genre written by white Caucasians in English, but also as a rising new genre written in over a dozen non-English languages well and published by authors of  a wide variety of ethnic and cultural backgrounds, according to Dan Bloom, curator of the Cli-Fi Report, which keeps track of the genre.

 

 

======================

Back in March, the Associated Press reported in a wire that ''colleges and universities worldwide are incorporating into their curriculums the evolving genre of literature that focuses on the changes coming to Earth as the result of climate change — “cli-fi.” ''

Some of the books and movies being considered as part of the rising new genre were older classics, while others were written more recently in direct response to today’s mad-made global warming and changing climate.

This fall semester, more cli-fi classes are popping up all over, including one taught by Malcolm Sen at UMASS, and another by Isiah Lavender at LSU. In both cases, the professors have academic backgrounds in post-colonial literature and multi-generational issues with exponential environmental, social, gendered and corporeal effects. Class discussions will elaborate on the multi-scalar and interconnected complexities that define environmental realities, ecological imperialism, the financialization and nuclearization of the planet, and the gendered aspects of climate change effects. ''Cli-fi'' is coming to be seen more and more as more than just a genre written by white Caucasians in English, but also as a rising new genre written in over a dozen non-English languages well and published by authors of  a wide variety of ethnic and cultural backgrounds, according to Dan Bloom, curator of the Cli-Fi Report, which keeps track of the genre.

UMASS LINK
http://northwardho.blogspot.tw/2016/06/professor-malcom-sen-native-of-india.html

 Professor Malcom Sen

LSU LNK
http://northwardho.blogspot.tw/2016/06/isiah-lavender-at-louisiana-state.html

 

 

 

Professor Isiah Lavender


“It’s a very, very energized time for this where people in literature have just as much to say as people who are in hard science fields, or technology and design fields, or various social-science approaches to these things,” said Jennifer Wicke, an English professor at the University of Virginia who taught a course in June on climate fiction at the Bread Loaf campus of Middlebury College in Ripton, Vermont.

The Bread Loaf School of English is mainly for elementary- and high school-level English teachers who can, in turn, take what they learn back to their classrooms to get their students to understand how literature can reflect current events.

“This course gave them a model for creating and imagining English courses that will help the young people whom they teach understand that reading literature, looking at the arts, looking at film isn’t something you do as an aside,” said Bread Loaf school Director Emily Bartels, also a professor of English at Rutgers University in New Jersey. “It’s something you do as you learn how to navigate your own moment in the 21st century.”

Cli-fi, a term that emerged less than 10 yearrs ago, is now being discussed and taught by academics across the nation and world. In April, about three dozen academics attended a workshop in Germany called “Between Fact and Fiction: Climate Change Fiction,” hosted by the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg Institute for Advanced Study in the northwestern city of Delmenhorst.

The website for the workshop lists some contemporary examples of books that fit the definition: Barbara Kingsolver’s “Flight Behavior,” about an Appalachian town to which confused monarch butterflies have migrated; Nathaniel Rich’s “Odds Against Tomorrow,” the story of a mathematician coping with catastrophe in New York; and Paolo Bacigalupi’s “The Water Knife,” about water wars in the southwestern United States.

An Interview with Vincent Lowry, author of a cli-fi novel titled "Lucy's Letter

 

 

An Interview with Vincent Lowry, author of a cli-fi novel titled "Lucy's Letter"

 

 

 

LINK with book cover and details:

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/598249

 

Dan Bloom at Cli-Fi.Net: Why did you decide to call the title of yr novel Lucy's letter?

 

Vince Lowry: The title of my book comes from the letter Lucy, my main character, writes in an effort to raise the awareness of the consequences of climate change.

 

2. Who is Lucy and who is the letter addressed to?

 

Vince Lowry: Lucy lives several generations in the future, and she is writing to the people of the past--the people who exist on our world right now. Lucy's life is drastically impacted by the choices made well before her birth. The letter serves as a warning, but also as an optimistic challenge to do the right thing by making climate change a first priority in our laws and policies. 

     

3. What is the time frame of the novel? Past present or future and why?

 

Vince Lowry: The novel takes place in the future in order to give a realistic account of what would happen if temperatures on Earth continued to rise. I made tomorrow's world as accurate as I could given the facts available to me today. 

 

4. What inspired or motivated you to personally want to write and publish this novel?

 

Vince Lowry: Right now [late July 2016] the forest and homes of Santa Clarita, CALIFORNIA, are burning just miles from house. I saw smoke billowing in the air as I approached my house about 15 minutes ago. I showed it to my young son, and he commented on the size of the smoke clouds. This fire is not the first one we've had near my house, and it's only a small example of what's happening in California and around the globe. It's real. It's not natural. And #LucysLetter will become more true every day as long as we ignore the problem and make zero to little effort in changing the way we live on this borrowed planet.    

 

5. Would call this a cli fi novel? Why or why not?

 

Vince Lowry: I suppose we could call it cli fi, and nothing would make me happier than if my novel truly was a fictional book about climate change. I don't win by being right on this subject. Neither does my son, or future generations. I want Earth to remain how I remember it as a kid: beautiful and hospitable. But unfortunately I think #LucysLetter is going to become a non-fictional work with each passing day. It's possible it could be one of the few books that changes genres because of the passage of time.  A cli fi book that turned out to be almost accurate generations from now. As I said, I hope that doesn't happen. I want my book to remain cli fi forever. I want the readers of tomorrow to see what I wrote and laugh at the silly notions I proposed. I want my great, great grandkids to laugh with them, to poke fun at crazy great, great granddad Vincent Lowry. I want them to look at the skies and not see what I see right this minute.

   

6. Have you heard of the cli fi term and if so how did you first hear about it? And what is your opinion of the term? Can it serve as a platform for novelists to tell climate themed stories? When you started yr book did you know the cli fi term already or did that come later?

 

Vince Lowry:  I honestly have never heard of the term cli fi until you mentioned it to me in your first email, but it's a befitting genre name for books like mine. I do think it could serve as a platform for novelists that talk about climate change.  

 

7. Who is yr target audience in terms of age group? Who do you most want to reach?

 

Vince Lowry: My target audience is both young adult and adult. I wrote it to reach as many people as possible, and that's because of the message of the book.

 

8. Any statement you want to make about writers and climate change?

 

Vince Lowry: Please help tell and share Lucy's story. It's not for my bottom line (royalties). I honestly could care less about the money because I've never written a book with the expectation that I'd get rich off of it. Lucy's letter is about our planet, our lives on it, and what we ultimately preserve or destroy for future generations. This subject is important. It has nothing to do with the agenda of any particular political party, or nation, or government body. #LucysLetter is about getting it right while we still have time. We have a short window, and we must do everything in our power to place climate change as our highest priority. If the oceans rise, if the forests burn, if the water resources dry up, if the world we've come to love changes for worse, no other priority will really matter in the grand scheme of things. What is healthcare without a healthy planet on which to live on? What is national security when the air we breathe poisons our lungs and stings our eyes? What is education when the history of our past will teach us that we ignored the most valuable lesson of all? What is economic growth when the most valuable asset--water--was once free and is now in scarce supply?

Earth comes first. End of story.

 

======

 

#LucysLetter - The Children of the Greenhouse Age

By Vincent Lowry

A dark family secret haunts a young Lucy Gold as she struggles to survive in a world ravaged by the effects of climate change. Her mother is a suspected murderer, her father has been absent since her birth, and her planet—after generations of careless greenhouse gas emissions—is a nightmare of droughts, fires, and violent storms. Lucy's goal is to unravel her past and discover her unique destiny. Less

Susan Gold is convicted of first degree murder for the killing of an abusive boyfriend, and during the first few months of her thirty-year sentence she gives birth to her only child—Lucy Gold. Susan’s life is cut short shortly after her labor, leaving Lucy completely in the dark about her biological parents as she’s raised by her grandma and uncle, who hide the family’s shameful past.
When Lucy reaches the age of twelve in the drought-ravaged town of Lake Sabrina, California, she devises a strategy to expose the family’s secret. Her plan fails, but Lucy’s grandma surprises her by coming to terms that Lucy is now old enough to know the long-concealed truth. The knowledge of her mother’s crime, and father’s abuses, both shocks Lucy’s conscience and shapes her identity, ultimately setting her on a path of utilizing her life for the good of society.
Filled with droughts, coastal floods, and violent storms, Lucy’s Letter – The Children of the Greenhouse Age follows Lucy, and the adolescents along her path, through a polluted world in disarray and turmoil, leading up the climatic letter that Lucy writes to be the final motivation for people to focus on what matters most—preserving the planet.

Isiah Lavender at Louisiana State University teaching a cli-fi class this fall semester

Education:

Ph.D., English, University of Iowa, July 2004
M.A., English, Louisiana State University, May 1998
B.A., English (honors), Southern University and A & M College, July 1996

Isiah  Lavender  III 

Assistant Professor

Science Fiction Studies
Cli-Fi or Environmental
Science Fictions

 

FALL SEMESTER LSU

Humanity has polluted the oceans, altered the atmosphere, and caused both plant and animal species mass extinctions,
among other impacts on the environment. Have we permanently altered/changed/damaged our planet? The term
Anthropocene denotes our current geological era in which human activities have become a telling factor in global
environmental change. Has the human epoch doomed us? When science fiction consequently goes green, it produces
fascinating climate fictions or cli-fi. We will consider types of ecological degradation in  this course as we explore the close
relationship between science fiction, ecology, and environmentalism.      

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Biography

Isiah Lavender, III is Assistant Professor of English at Louisiana State University, where he researches and teaches courses in African American literature and science fiction.  In addition to his book Race in American Science Fiction (Indiana UP, 2011) and edited collection Black and Brown Planets: the Politics of Race in Science Fiction (UP of Mississippi, 2014), his publications on science fiction include essays and reviews in journals such as Extrapolation, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, and Science Fiction Studies.  He’s currently working on his second monograph Classics of Afrofuturism as well as a second collection, Yellow Planets: Racial Representations of Asia in Science Fiction, now under contract with the University Press of Mississippi.

Professor Malcom Sen, a native of India, with a PHD from University College Dublin, is teaching an important cli-fi course at UMASS in Amherst, Massachusetts this fall semester

Faculty Profile

Malcolm Sen

Malcolm Sen teaches at UMASS

This FALL SEMESTER 2016 he will be teaching a cli-fi course. Details below

891LC---Literature & Climate Change    


PROFSSOR Malcolm Sen received his BA from the University of Calcutta, India and his MA and PhD from University College Dublin.

Wednesdays, 6:30-9:00 pm
What is the role of the humanities, especially literature, in an era of climate change? At a time of diminishing futures it seems that action on climate change has been relegated to the short timescales and utopian rhetoric of international policy and the even shorter timescales and business-as-usual vocabulary of the global market. However, climate change is a multi-generational issue with exponential environmental, social, gendered and corporeal effects. In this course we will deliberate upon the languages used to understand, critique and narrativize environmental degradation, and read literary texts that directly engage with climate change. We will read contemporary novels from a variety of genres: cli-fi (climate fiction), social realism, speculative and post-apocalyptic fiction, petro-fiction and a thriller. Discussions will elaborate on the multi-scalar and interconnected complexities that define environmental realities, ecological imperialism, the financialization and nuclearization of the planet, and the gendered aspects of climate change effects. The change of climate change is principally environmental but in effect social, an area which is predominantly within the discursive realm of the humanities. Indeed, this division between the environmental and the social is itself misleading. Narrating our present and our history differently, this course will argue, may allow us to reveal alternative and liveable futures.




Primary Texts:  Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behaviour; Romesh Gunesekara, Reef
Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide; Margaret Atwood, Year of the Flood
Liz Jensen, The Rapture; Cormac McCarthy, The Road; Nathaniel Rich, Odds Against Tomorrow; Hemon Habila, Oil on Water.


Malcolm Sen was the Irish Research Council and Marie Curie Elevate Fellow at Harvard University (2014-2015). Previously, he was awarded the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship at the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame (2011-2012). His other awards include a Humanities Institute of Ireland Research Scholarship (2002-2006) and the Moore Institute Visiting Fellowship at the National University of Ireland Galway (2014). He received his BA from the University of Calcutta, India and his MA and PhD from University College Dublin. He has taught in a number of Irish universities, including Trinity College Dublin, the National University of Ireland Galway and Maynooth University. His research has been published in key journals and books and he recently co-edited Postcolonial Studies and the Challenges for the New Millennium which was published by Routledge in January 2016. He was one of the researchers of the landmark PBS / RTE documentary on the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916 which is currently being aired. Malcolm is the series editor of a podcast series on “Irish Studies and the Environmental Humanities” that is widely available for download online. He is currently completing his book project, Environment, Narrative and Sovereignty.