Wylie peeks into what life will be like in year 2170
THE year is 2170 and the Eastern Cape has drastically changed. A global and environmental crisis has decimated the population and diminished the once lush lands.
In Dan Wylie’s futuristic climate change novel, The Wisdom of Adders, readers are hurled into realistic and terrifying possibilities of what our world might become.
Narrated in the third person and set in one of the surviving communities [Grahamstown], the novel is sharply lyrical in its prose.
Shawn Xaba is the fiercely independent and likeable female protagonist. Spunky and rebellious, it is difficult not to root for her.
“[She’s] – as I envisage most of the population in 2170 being – a sort of Brazilian scene where almost everyone is just a variant of brown. But she does connect with the most ancient of our indigenous lineages, the Bushmen or San people,” explains Wylie.
“I guess I wanted her to have a certain kind of rootedness in the landscape.”
Xaba is accompanied by the elusive, attractive Mali and guided by the mysterious Stormchaser, who writes depressing and yet informative poems about history.
A distant relation of sci-fi, climate change fiction often uses satire and cynicism to convey a particular message about the conservation and protection of our planet.
As Alice Robinson, author of Anchor Point, says: “Scientific reports are only projections, best estimates based on facts. But fiction can transport us into the now of a climaticallyaltered future, showing us not only what the world will look like, but also how it will be experienced.
“Even more powerfully, fiction has the capacity to talk in emotional terms about what will be lost.
“While science is able to communicate the scope of potential extinction and so on, fiction can portray the associated grief. It can go where science cannot; into memory and desire, hearts and minds, charting the capacity of the human race to reflect on what has transpired, to remember and, regardless, to soldier on.”
Wylie, who is also a lecturer in the English Department at Rhodes University, shares a similar sentiment.
“We are rightly profoundly concerned with the fate of the planet, its ecosystems, and our own humanity. At the moment we’re on a hiding to nowhere; so we have to imagine future scenarios as a way of deciding what to do in the present,” he says.
Cleverly portraying this dystopic world even within its structural elements, the dialect and language reflect and endorse just how distinctly this society has altered.
Local readers especially will find “kentonsi” (Kenton-on-Sea), “thirst” (Bathurst) and “Palfred” (Port Alfred) familiarly humorous. Other lingual modifications that Wylie makes are “kiimitha” for kilometre and “frack” as a word of profanity.
In essence, Wylie weaves a moving tale about a young girl’s quest to find her father alongside the pressing environmental challenges society might face if we continue to destroy our ecosystems for consumerist purposes.
Extinction of species, fracking, drought, technology and other ecological issues are located around the surviving beauty of the Eastern Cape.
If you enjoy local works of fiction that are descriptive and vivid then The Wisdom of Adders is definitely a must-read.
The Wisdom of Adders can be purchased from Amazon