Here We Go: Every Story Is A Climate (cult) Story

So, apparently the science fiction book I’m reading now is linked to ‘climate change’ in some form or fashion. And the zombie apocalypse one before that is about ‘climate change’. And all the science fiction, horror, fantasy, and a smattering of mystery are all ‘climate change’ books

Beyond Cli-Fi: Why Every Story is a Climate Change Story

Wait, I don’t have global heating on here?

I started my second novel, The Emilys, with a single sentence: “What did I love about going to get the vaccine?” All I knew was that a mom was leaving her house before dawn. I knew she was so happy to walk the streets of her small town alone in the darkness without cooking cereal or warming milk or finding the right stuffy. I knew that when she arrived downtown, a line had already formed in front of the CVS, circling the block. She joined the end of the line in front of the yarn store. (skipping to the relevant section)

The day I read that Lyme disease is considered the first epidemic of climate change, I saw my novel draft rise from my computer, a little spindly thing, a sapling, and expand, like that scene in the Nutcracker when the tree grows and grows to reach the top of the theater while Tchaikovsky’s music soars. Oh, I thought, looking up to see my novel touch the attic ceiling. I’m writing a climate change novel! (snip)

Then I read Lydia Millet’s The Children’s Bible. The story opens in a multi-family summer house. The parents are louche, disinterested in their kids. The kids are savvy, scheming to avoid their parents. A typical vacation, until end-times interrupt. Biblical rain takes down civilization as we know it. The catastrophic part of the book is shockingly witty and beautiful, but the first part shook me even more. In the prelapsarian present, the parents are naïve and totally unprepared, yet climate anxiety thrums in the background as they drink vodka, prepare tofu pups, check the weather. It felt familiar, how climate disaster sits with us in our ordinary lives. We push it away, and still it changes us.

After I finished this book, I started to see climate fiction in all the fiction I read. I saw it in a man’s mid-life crisis trip around the world. I saw it when a crotchety old lady in Maine notices the changing leaves. Arthur Less and Olive Kitteridge are in a relationship with the warming world, as are their authors, no matter if it rises to the level of consciousness. I saw climate forces in the flowers Mrs. Dalloway wanted to buy herself and the green lawns of Cheever’s suburbia. When characters scrolled their phones, I wondered if they saw headlines about existential demise and how this felt in their bodies. When I read beachside stories, I wondered if the rising seas crossed the characters’ minds as they took their morning swims. Did they notice the erosion in the dunes since last summer? Did they consider that the family home they were all vying to inherit would soon be worthless?

Sigh

Once I saw every story as a climate story, I became less interested in imagining future apocalypse and global worst-case scenarios, worthy and entertaining as that is, and more interested in thinking about how the local climate crises that we’re already living through—the floods and ticks and fires—alter our relationships: the relationships between those who fear a truncated future and those who deny the change, the relationships between us humans and the plants around us, the relationship between a brain that wants a break from thinking about climate and a body that feels the grief of a too-hot spring day.

These people are truly broken. Just indoctrinated into a worldwide doomsday cult.