Reckoning

Kyle Tam

We are living in a time of perpetual change. The kind of change that could see water being forcibly rationed and withheld from all but the most privileged or most criminal. The kind of change that shows us that tourism, whether well-meaning or not, has worn away at the natural and metaphysical consciousness of a country for the sake of money. The kind of change which would see alien planets eradicating mankind because our individualism is destroying us and the planet with it. Well . . .  perhaps that last change is a little far-fetched, but it is one of the what-ifs used to counter the what is-es of the short stories in Green to Grey: An Environmental Anthology (Guernica Editions) edited by Ian Thomas Shaw and Timothy Niedermann.

The anthology is divided into two halves. The first, Green, is a collection of what is-es: stories of our environment and our planet as it currently is, and more specifically the ways in which the past and our present have deteriorated due to both active and passive disregard for our world. The stories capture how the self-centeredness of individuals and the cruelties of capitalism have eroded our hopes for a positive climate future that we must, nevertheless, push back against. The second half, Grey, looks more towards the what-ifs: the possibilities of our environmental future if we stay the course and fail to protect our world.

Green is composed of eight stories that, although branching, all tie back to the anthology’s native Canada and the ways in which the Global North it represents has tainted those things it has touched or forgotten for the sake of greed, glory, or cruelty.  This may be my own sentiment, but the stories that have lingered with me the longest are those written by authors who have highlighted the struggles of immigrants and the Global South. These stories are told both from the side of those who have been taken from—as in “Endangered Species” or “Wild Geese”—and from those who do the taking, like in “Patagonia” and “Tio”.

Caroline Vu’s “Endangered Species” is a reflection on the ways in which war and the lust for power are affecting the ability of both native wildlife and the protagonist to survive, while Jerry Levy’s “The Anarchist” reflects on the big and little factors that can cause your average person to turn their back on the established patterns of the world.

In both stories, we see how the protagonist’s lives have been irreversibly changed by national or corporate greed. They are those who have been taken from, who have lost their families due to larger entities that do not see who is being affected at the individual level. There is resistance, but such resistance seems to have little meaning, particularly in “The Anarchist,” in which Gavin, the leader of our protagonist’s comrades in arms, is naught but “a two-bit hood disguised as a radical for causes . . . . But he doesn’t really care. He uses all the environmental rhetoric to serve his own needs,” and where Sal, one of these comrades, plainly states that, “Lots of people get shafted. The environment gets shafted. It’s just that, as I’ve gotten a bit older, my priorities have shifted” (p.37). The big causes matter less in the face of one’s personal agendas and concerns, fading into the background of one’s immediate life.

“Wild Geese,” as a piece reflecting the immigrant experiences of Koreans in the West who are even more than fish out of water, is slower and more melancholy than the rest of the anthology. It is less concerned with the direct environment than it is about the fragile lives of those who desperately flee their homes. Those seeking refuge in a place where they are not made to belong. While lacking in the immediacy and blunt metaphor of some of the other pieces in the collection, as an Asian who has lived a few years in a country that sometimes felt almost hostile to my identity, I felt resonant pangs of shared frustration with the protagonist’s father. He is a man who worked quietly frying chicken at KFC or repairing appliances for church congregants, turned a blind eye to his wife’s liaisons with her Vietnamese boss, and described memory as a narcotic. Some immigrants, like the father, will make themselves smaller or fade into the background, the better to blend in, making themselves helpful so they cannot be demonized even as they allow themselves to be demeaned in small ways for the sake of peace. Some, like the mother, integrate themselves through appeasement with their bodies or talents—objectified for the sake of personal gain. They are reflections of the titular geese flown too far away from home and unable to find their way back—drowned and dead because they have lost the wind beneath their wings, the motivation to continue onwards, living hollow lives full of reminiscence on the past.

“Patagonia” and “Trash Day,” on the other hand, are stories that  focus not on victims but on the perpetrators of petty violence against the earth and its inhabitants. The former looks at the ways in which tourism and appealing to tourists have warped the country’s environment, culture, and people through the story of a western visitor seeking closure and healing from tragedy in his own life through the lens of another nation. As he is told by his friend, Charley, “You need some beauty to distance yourself from grief. Patagonia is the perfect place” (p.58). “Trash Day” is a more immediate story that uses the individual act of picking up garbage to demonstrate the futility of trying to do small kindnesses in a capitalist society that has been built on convenience and harm.

Of the two, I found “Patagonia” lingered with me longer in that I was reminded of my own home: the sandy beaches of Boracay and Palawan that have been ravaged by tourists to the point that the former had to be closed for years for rehabilitation, the reefs that have been bleached bone white or ruined by the activities of careless tourists, and the friendly smiles that hide the corruption and poverty that run rampant in the Philippines as they do in Argentina and many other countries thousands of miles away from me. The story’s theme is best summarized when its protagonist states: “Twenty years ago, I first came to Patagonia for healing, when, all along, it’s Patagonia that needs to be healed” (p. 74). Tourists seek freedom from their reality, and in doing so have eroded a nation that already exists for its people. Their money is a disruptor, you see, bartered in exchange for room and board, cuisine, company, and sometimes dignity. They leave behind their garbage and are often irreverent with the emotions and environment left behind, taking more than what they have paid for.

My favorite story in the collection, Matthew Murphy’s “Tio,” became ever more harrowing from beginning to end as it contrasts the struggles of miners within the darkened tunnels of Bolivia and the tourists who come to gawk and twitter at their painful existences. It is a showcase of man’s inhumanity towards man and of the exploitation that has become the means by which the lines in the world have been drawn. I was reminded of the infamous “Afghan Girl” photo of Sharbat Ghula and the prestige gained from the utter disregard of real suffering even as it is fully on display.

“Green Toe” begins with the mundanity of a man breaking his toe and ends with the wilderness reclaiming its own. Strangely, this makes “Green Toe” one of the more hopeful stories in an anthology largely defined by anger at injustices levied against Earth. In a world that is defined by man’s control over what they believe belongs to them, where one “had shaped my home environment to my own preferences for order and symmetry, without a thought what else might be possible,” that this small patch can return to the wild precipitates the hope that nature as a whole may someday, too, return to that wilderness, and that we can peacefully coexist with it (p. 47).

The Grey half of the anthology is a little more disparate, more scattered than Green’s beginnings. While every story is concerned with the future, the element of speculation is not always immediate, and that feels intentional. The future envisioned in the science fiction of yesteryear, of flying cars and identical robots, has eroded in the face of a humanity that must struggle to survive the adversity of climate change.

“Found Divination” and “A Green and Just Recovery” feel like sister pieces, each focused on showing visions of the future through the lens of fortune telling, using tarot cards and the I Ching, respectively.  In “Found Divination,” refusing to pay $50 for the full deck of cards, the protagonist finds two tarot cards and ruminates on what they might signify in a world where the stars have been hidden by haze. They conclude that “some say you should make up your own meanings, that the first meaning you make will be the right one, and this is mine” (p.120). Future as shaped by the intention one puts in.

In “A Green and Just Recovery,” our protagonist, Simon, thinks of making animal tile oracles or randomly searching I Ching books and websites as a means to anchor himself to his work and to his life. As Hiroko, someone precious who now exists in Simon’s past,  said: “If we’re going to invent an oracular method . . . for it to carry any energy, we have to create meanings, not just paste on someone else’s” (p. 171). The future not as certainty and fate, but something malleable to be shaped by human interpretation.

“Saving Morro” and “Hothouse Love,” on the other hand, are linked only by dint of being the most explicitly speculative fiction works in the anthology, though this is where the similarities between the two end. “Saving Morro” presents a vision of a world where water is a tightly controlled resource, evoking Mad Max and other barren dystopias while punching readers in the gut by introducing us to Arden, a hitchhiker on an important quest to secure water (which he carries in a hockey bag) for the titular baby Morro.  The story ends with him unceremoniously mugged, “a praying mantis face-down in the dirt, the hockey bag nowhere to be seen,” the water that was the purpose for his journey now long gone (p. 168). “Hothouse Love” is the longest, strangest, and somehow both the most hopeful and most scathing treatise against humanity contained in From Green to Grey. It is a story I enjoyed, but also one that lingered strangely within my consciousness, bringing me back again and again to ruminate on both its message and its prophet.

Notably, the collection is book-ended by two short stories by Ian Howard Shaw. “Green-ish,” the first story in the collection, follows the ramblings of a would-be member of the Green Party. In a similar vein, “Grey-ish” brings us to the not-too-far future consumed by AI. The protagonists of both are motor-mouthed and ornery, and I will caution readers that there is no subtlety in the satires that Shaw has presented in a future containing the “Federal Union of China, Korea, and Russia (FUCKR)” (p.184). It is no exaggeration to say that their viewpoint, older gentlemen are irritating and insufferable. But this insufferability, this blunt force satire that wallops you over the head, is the point. We live in a world occupied by talking heads like this who will keep talking nonsense over and around us, and to have their nonsensical attitudes laid bare is quite eye-opening.

What struck me most when I was reading through From Green to Grey is the undercurrent of despair and fury in the stories in the Green section, and how much it clashes with the uncertainty of what is to come. These are not hopeful stories that believe in our climate future. These are stories that display the deep ugliness of our climate present, a call to action, a memorial to the true struggles of those who live in areas forced into adversity. Those who dream of our climate future cannot conceive of having a perfect green world, with the most peaceful and greenest of these fantasies being the one that has been taken over entirely by entities who are not or are no longer human.

In my own studies of urban planning, I have discovered that creation of a space, of a place, is best defined by intentionality. A place is defined both by those who have planned for its purposes, whether these be its owners, its creators, its inhabitants, or its visitors. Here in From Green to Grey, through each and every lens, we have seen that the place we inhabit that we call Planet Earth is defined and shaped by disparate forces. Not all of mankind is wholly to blame—after all, from the mines of Bolivia to the mountains of Patagonia to the farthest reaches of Vietnam, man is a victim of man. Somehow I am reminded of my childhood and of the Lorax’s UNLESS, carved in stone atop an abandoned stone platform, meaning that unless we do something, unless we choose to redefine and shape our planet, the place we live in will continue to deteriorate.

There is a phrase that runs deeply through “Found Divination,” which is: “What do we do now? Where do we go? How do we get there?” (p. 119). I think it is one that exemplifies the intentions of Green to Grey best. We have come to this point in time when environmental, social, and personal injustices have run rampant, as exemplified in every story within this anthology. And now that you have come to the end of this collection, having been inundated with stories meant to inspire and provoke, as readers you and I must continue to ask AND answer these questions:

What do we do now?

Where do we go?

How do we get there?

Redfern Jon Barrett

Fairytales are revealing: they tell us about the world in which they were formed, the landscapes and values that created them. They’re also ever-changing, morphing to meet the mindsets of the times. The brutality of the Brothers Grimm is transmogrified by Disney; the pagan folk stories of Wales morph into the Christianity-friendly fables of the Mabinogion.  As climate change rapidly shifts the realities of life on our planet, it only makes sense that the stories alter also. Which brings us to Syr Hayati Beker’s ambitious collection, What a Fish Looks Like (Stelliform).

Despite how often these stories change, it can be difficult to pull off an effective fairytale revision. Reimagining traditional stories isn’t exactly uncharted territory—I mean, I studied Margaret Atwood’s modern revisal of “Bluebeard” when I was doing my Master’s degree a whole two decades ago (good gods, am I really so old?). So Syr Hayati Beker has set themself quite a challenge. How do you tread such a well-worn path through the enchanted forest and still keep the trek even vaguely interesting?

From the outset, it’s clear that What a Fish Looks Like isn’t afraid to innovate. The evocative language and nonconventional format of its very first pages draw the reader into the book’s broken world, one where there are “no frogs left to kiss.” This is where climate futures and traditional tales mesh so well, as we’re immediately confronted with the natural core of fairytales that we’ve long taken for granted: forests and wolves; mice and pumpkins; fish and the sea. In this collection the names of old tales have been crossed out and replaced by a version that fits the eco-catastrophe. “The Little Mermaid” is changed to “Playlist 4Merx in Times of Sea Levels Rising”, “The Snow Queen” to “Server Farm Queen”, “Beauty and the Beast” to “What a Fish Looks Like”.

But this isn’t a set of disjointed retellings. The six stories all form part of an overarching narrative, with the spaces between filled with letters, notes, ticket stubs, and illustrations. This fits the standard “apocalyptic journal” trope, but it also goes far beyond it. The broken fragments, so poignant and heartfelt, present something very human. The world is dying, our thoughts scratched over the pages of a tattered book, and yet we live. We love. Thoroughly and painfully.

Through it all we follow a diverse set of mostly queer and trans people clustered in a dying city. With their fears, joys, and heartbreaks interweaving their way through the book, it becomes clear that it’s the characters themselves that form the real collection here, rather than the individual fairy stories. Each presents their own perspective on the climate catastrophe they’re living (and dying) through, and the first we’re introduced to are Seb and Jay.

This old collection of tales has been handed back and forth between the two former lovers, revealing their often-competing attitudes as well as their turbulent relationship. While Jay finds optimism in community and technology—even planning on leaving the poisoned Earth on an “Exodus” ship—Seb scans the empty oceans, desperately seeking life in the once-teeming seas. On first glance, Jay could be seen to embody hope, Seb something more like despair. Yet their roles aren’t binary (more on that later), but more of a confused tangle. Jay’s optimism can be cruel and wilfully shallow; Seb’s role involves listening to the long-dead depths on the off-chance that something will call to them. Neither is right. Neither wrong.

“After you left, I watched live video of that action that put you in the news: the last elephant funeral. Two thousand people crying in public, in paper elephant masks. What’s so hopeful about that?” (p. 25)

Life goes on. Life never stops going on, even as the air becomes hard to breath, the swelling oceans rise, and invasive “Sleeping Beauty”-style vines choke their way across the city. In the retelling of “The Little Mermaid” we meet a trans woman struggling through her own personal catastrophes, all while making plans to finally come out and live a life that’s authentic to her. Even in this mired world, her desires for the future ring clear. Meanwhile, “Antigone, But With Spiders” follows a theatre crew as they attempt to put on a live performance, one they hope will bring the neighbourhood together. They all command their own agency, not mere victims of our environmental mistakes, but people who want to live and thrive. As the narrative itself points out, this is an excavation of human lives: “The same way you can see in layers of rock and soil when there was an ice age or a drought, you can tell on the bathroom door where the world kept on ending and not ending in different ways” (p. 53).

Throughout it all, these characters are not alone. They seek solace in one another, forming collectives that continually shift and change. These collectives seem to have formed in the absence of authority, an anarchist solution to this slow apocalypse, and the overarching story explores all the strengths and weaknesses of community in the face of devastation. As someone who’s been involved in different queer communities across different countries, there’s so much that’s familiar here. With so many end-of-the-world stories featuring the same straight cis nuclear families, it’s heartening—and terrifying—for this Armageddon to hit so close to home.

As we saw with Seb and Jay, the characters are given a choice: to be part of #TeamEarth, or to join #TeamShip. That is, to stay and deal with the growing planetary catastrophe, or to take a chance on one of the Exodus ships heading for a new world (a choice complicated by the spreading vines and the fact that the first two Exodus ships may have met a grisly end). Individuals switch from one group to the other, and though there’s a great deal of ideological baggage attached to each choice, neither is presented as fundamentally right or wrong. Both are optimistic, both pessimistic.

All these elements combine to buck the binary of utopia and dystopia. I’ve written extensively on “ambitopia”, of going beyond these traditionally stale dualisms to discover something more relevant to our ever-changing world. To create something more than the rigid, complacent promises of utopia and the heedless despair of dystopia; fictions that help us deal with everything that prior generations have left for us. Here, collectives are established even as wider society fails; new stories are told when old worlds die. With its extremes of hope and despair, lethal environmental chaos occurring alongside attempts at artistic order—all in the face of queer love and community—What a Fish Looks Like presents a complex ambitopian future. It’s an ever-emerging genre that’s only growing more important as global temperatures continue to rise.

This non-binary approach is of course reflected in the book’s nonconventional format. Though mostly expressed via various textual fragments, What a Fish Looks Like also takes the time to showcase other forms of art. I briefly mentioned the illustrations before, and I have to take a moment to dwell on these, because the drawings scattered throughout the pages are absolutely spectacular. Aside from serving as another element that keeps the fairytale revisions feeling fresh, these images serve as visual reminders of the value of art itself, even—especially—at the end of the world. The beautiful creations formed in response to climate catastrophe can’t be separated from the very climate catastrophe that inspired them, and so they literally illustrate the book’s rejection of easy dualisms: utopia and dystopia, triumph and tragedy, gain and loss. Once I’d finished the stories, I found myself flicking back through the pages to revisit the trash-ravished ocean waves and posters referencing classical sculpture.

The text itself is equally haunting and rich. The bitter poetic elegance of the language carries the reader through devastation both public and personal, with formatting played with throughout; not only in the varied media used but via the playful placing of words upon the page, with scattered shards of sentences colliding with one another. This can be another aspect that’s difficult to pull off, yet they fit perfectly with the book’s wider themes alongside the queer, fractured hopes of its characters. There’s also a constant playful wit that dances its way throughout the novel, both highlighting and lightening the various small tragedies, further adding to the text’s depths.

“The air is aluminum and your throat is a microwave and everything crackles.” (p. 61)

By now it should be fairly obvious that I loved this book. But that’s not to suggest that all its elements came across perfectly. Though I enjoyed most of the stories, the retelling of “Little Red Riding Hood”—now “Root Systems”—managed to lose me. This tale was too abstract, beautifully evocative yet dropping the book’s narrative thread. It doesn’t help that it occurs in the middle of a crisis moment for one of the characters, shifting focus at what felt like the wrong moment. “Root Systems” also played into the fears I had before starting this collection, because we’ve been here before when it comes to fairytale retellings. The grandma is tough, the wolf misunderstood, and the lumberjack demolishes the forest. Among an otherwise unique set of stories, this rewrite of “Little Red Riding Hood” relies on too many old tropes.

Thankfully, it’s a small proportion of the overall text, and that’s the only real issue I had. Otherwise, the overall tone of What a Fish Looks Like never gets old, with tragedy morphing into dry humour, on into moments of persevering beauty, and back again. The emotional range is as varied as it is rich. It sweeps through different forms of collapse, not only in terms of governance and ecosystems, but even that of data infrastructure—which is compellingly explored in the final story, “Server Farm Queen”. Dealing with the swirling flurry of broken data, with information systems overwhelmed with meaningless garbage, the story reminds us that information pollution is also an unfurling disaster, one that impacts our psyches just as a changing climate impacts our bodies.

“Coke bottles. Polar Bears. Banksy. Warhol. Work of art. Do not be afraid of the—Meditation for a healthier—You could be at risk for—Symptoms include brain fog, losing sleep, sleeping too much, mood swings, Stop.” (p. 108)

So how can there be fairy tales without those deep dark forests, without the teeming wonder of the sea? How can there be handsome princes when there’s no functioning government, or even frogs left to kiss? Thanks to Syr Hayati Beker’s vivid imagination and gorgeous writing style, we’re given a fascinating glimpse into the recreated myths of an eco-wrecked world—as well as, more importantly, the actual people that lie behind them. All of which is revealed not only through conventional stories, but also via the scrawled notes, exquisite drawings, and fragmented poetry that they pass back and forth to one another. It’s all so gloriously messy. And so very human.

Here’s something any student of literature can tell you: when something is a literal “must-read,” it becomes a chore. Even a beloved book can be slow and burdensome when you have to get through it, and that’s no less true when it comes to writing reviews. But these stories and their annotations drew me in, they made me forget the compulsion even as I stopped to write my notes. Of all the books I’ve had the opportunity to review, What a Fish Looks Like is one of my absolute favourites. And this human excavation, with all of its complex characters, beautiful language, and keen ambitopian vision of a climate-ravaged future, could easily become one of your favourites, too.