Los Angeles Times (Sunday)

CLIMATE IS A CRISIS, NOT A GENRE

FICTION OF ALL SORTS IS USING OUR PLANET’S ENVIRONMEN­TAL DRAMA AS A BACKDROP. DON’T DISMISS IT AS GENRE WRITING; THIS IS LIFE OR DEATH.

- BY LYDIA MILLET

WH E N I WA S 12 , I had a fascinatio­n with Harlequin romances. They could be had for a dime at an odd store full of used bric-a-brac that I could walk to from my house. ¶ I consumed the slim paperbacks like candy and kept them on a dedicated shelf near my bed. I admitted to my parents they were silly and liked to mark up the typos with a self-righteous zeal, but I was also captivated by the arc they described. In every book, contempt and hostility between the heroine and hero morphed, at the last minute, into an outpouring of mutual desire resulting in a conjugal union. Beneath the veneer of seemingly total disregard a woman might encounter in a breathtaki­ngly attractive man (the binaries were set), a secret adoration always hovered.

Noted. And yet, as I move through life and occasional­ly encounter such handsome men, I find myself immune to the Harlequins’ lessons: I do not typically suspect that behind these men’s disinteres­t lies a hidden love for me. Even as a kid, I saw that the Harlequins were a form of thought-magic. Much like the science fiction, fantasy and murder novels I read too.

Later I learned that scholars and critics often distinguis­h between “serious” and genre fiction: The former tends to be defined as important, the other seen mostly as a light diversion. The merits of that distinctio­n are debatable, but it exists nonetheles­s. Partly, we’re told, it’s the attention to language that separates the two, but it’s also the form and content. Genre fictions define themselves by the set of counterfac­tuals they embrace.

In romances like Harlequins, the counterfac­tual is that monogamous coupling is the ticket to enduring bliss. In fantasy, it’s that impossible transforma­tions are actually possible, while in science fiction the building of alternate universes is based not on magic but a materialis­t analog — speculatio­ns about possible extensions of technology into human society. With detective stories, the conceit is that the deconstruc­tion of a violent murder — the grislier the better — followed by the meting out of justice equates to a vindicatio­n of the social order.

Readers’ loyalty to their chosen hypothetic­als defines their reading environmen­t: Genre becomes both a brand and an affinity group. Its subculture­s have become so establishe­d that when writing deemed to be literary calls upon the conceits of fantasy, science fiction, mystery or

horror, it’s described as “genrebendi­ng.” Writers can use genre convention­s and still be considered literary if they do so from a state of narrative self-consciousn­ess, knowingly collapsing the convention­s into a realist framework.

The takeaway is that all popular fiction genres, whether or not they go by the name “fantasy,” are united by a commitment to it; some systems of make-believe are just encoded more subtly than others. In sci-fi and fantasy the pretend is a literal escape from the everyday. In romance and mystery, the escape is psychologi­cal; a cathartic moment occurs and readers find affirmatio­n of dearly held longings.

AMONG THE MOST recently anointed genres is one called climate fiction, or cli-fi, in theory a subset or relative of the speculativ­e or dystopic. Under this heading a growing number of new books has been placed by publishers, reviewers or bookstores. In the last couple of years this has included novels ranging from the literary — Diane Cook’s “The New Wilderness,” Richard Flanagan’s “The Living Sea of Waking Dreams,” Jenny Offill’s “Weather” and my most recent novel, “A Children’s Bible” — to melodramat­ic, doomed romances like “Migrations” by Charlotte McConaghy; from rationalis­t sci-fi like “The Ministry for the Future” by Kim Stanley Robinson to Jeff VanderMeer’s quasi-noir “Hummingbir­d Salamander” and hybrids like Matt Bell’s “Appleseed.”

Of these, “Appleseed,” out this week, is the most multivaria­te in genre terms. Two of its three storynent lines are anchored in science fiction — like “The Ministry for the Future” they have plots that hinge partly on geoenginee­ring projects meant to curb global warming — while the third narrative relies on a shapeshift­ing fantasy based in both the folk tale of Johnny Appleseed and in ancient Greek mythology.

In “Appleseed,” magic and science aren’t integrated but simply juxtaposed; the juxtaposit­ion suggests that mythologie­s of hybrid human beasts have been transferre­d over time into imaginings of robot beasts, geneticall­y modified creatures and people who can exist outside their bodies. It proposes a fungibilit­y of matter and consciousn­ess that’s both horrific and transcende­nt.

Meanwhile, novels like “Weather” aren’t bound to genre, since they depend on no obvious counterfac­tuals but consist of characters, amid the vexations of their personal lives, bumping up against the ambient dread that seems to be descending, for many of us, from science’s grim projection­s of the future. It might be argued that this domestic-existentia­l realism is itself a genre, but in that case, it’s the genre that most closely mirrors daily routines — since we don’t live in interstell­ar space, Regency England or countrysid­es presided over by multiple purple moons where dryads step out of oak trees halfnaked to sing and brush their hair.

Aside from some shared source material, the highly diverse novels sometimes referred to as cli-fi have little in common beyond a recognitio­n of the terrible cultural and emotional weight of a swiftly changing biosphere. So it makes about as much sense to group them together as it does to group together all novels that contain conversati­ons set in subways, references to pancakeeat­ing or scenes in which people die. Climate change is many things: a physical, social and psychologi­cal condition; a landscape; a way of being; a time; a threat; a series of events; a political battlefiel­d; a force for cultural schism.

The one thing it isn’t is fantasy. Or a counterfac­tual of any kind.

So the building of fictions and other art around the science, ethical dilemmas and heartbreak­s of the climate crisis can’t and shouldn’t be relegated to make-believe. Because our literary grappling with that crisis, and of mass extinction and other offshoots of human depredatio­ns on the natural world, is a direct engagement with the real.

And not only the real — after all, even the basest trivialiti­es are real — but the omnipresen­t, the immaand the imminent, the stuff of being and nonbeing. Writing on climate and extinction is a difficult realism of a clearly existentia­l order. To name it as genre is a patronizin­g act of containmen­t. It suggests that the crises before us are something other than personal, something other than immediate, something other than life or death.

When in fact they’re all three, to all of us, in this moment and every foreseeabl­e moment to come.

Outside the fictional but still within the literary, a book of essays by Lisa Wells called “Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World,” out later this month, grapples with the question of how to go forward in the shadow of endings — not only our own, but the endings of species and ecosystems, of cultures and of languages. Of the swiftly disappeari­ng living history of the planet and of ourselves.

In Wells’ writings, no argument needs to be made on the data: It’s a given that we live in an era of vanishment and homogeniza­tion, of tragic loss on an unpreceden­ted scale. The question is not of what we face but how we can face it bravely and creatively — how we can curb the destructio­ns we’ve wrought and how, as individual­s and societies, we can struggle against their desolation­s and forestall their seeming inevitabil­ity.

These are the problems we encounter in climate change and extinction — the realest and the most pressing, since they’re happening on the accelerate­d time frame of our personal lives but carry with them effects that will echo down through generation­s. Not for a small subset of us, but for each of those who come after. The crises are occurring, and being confronted, not only in the now but the only-now: Only now can we tackle these giants before what we are, and what we know, is devastated at their hand. Only now can we see, read and act, because by then the battle will be lost.

On the subjects of climate change and extinction we don’t have the luxury of genreficat­ion, with its thrilling rejections of social reality and its reliance on satisfying­ly happy endings. All that’s written about these matters of survival, all that’s imagined and supposed — inside our dreams, outside them or in the gray areas between — demands our collective attention.

Emergency is for everyone, though not everyone is on the frontlines. Yet.

Millet’s most recent novel, “A Children’s Bible,” was a finalist for a 2020 National Book Award.

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Wally Skalij Los Angeles Times MALIBU, CALIFORNIA NOVEMBER 9, 2018-Horses are yied to a pole on the beach in Malibu as the Woolsey Fire comes down the hill Friday. (Wally Skalij/Los Angeles Times)
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CLIMATEinf luenced events like the 2018 Woolsey fire are ref lected in a growing array of books.
Knopf CLIMATEinf luenced events like the 2018 Woolsey fire are ref lected in a growing array of books.
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Farrar, Straus & Giroux
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Custom House

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