Category: Review

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.

Justine Payton

What it’s like. When the death of your home is someone else’s lesson learned (p. 118).

These are the thoughts of Dario, who lives in a vertical city after sea-level rise claimed his childhood home and forced him to resettle. He watches, captivated, as the artist Yeong-cheol Min sculpts clay into a representation of Dario’s former homeland, a series of barrier islands now raised only in art above the all-consuming waters, made visible through the artist’s careful and deliberate touch.

This scene is from “Accensa Domo Proximi” by Cameron Ishee, one of twelve short stories in Metamorphosis, an anthology composed of winning submissions to Grist’s Imagine 2200 short story contest. Unlike climate change fiction that depicts dystopian and apocalyptic worlds, these stories craft different visions for humanity’s future, ones that offer “hope and faith in our ability as an imperfect but resilient species to unpack past traumas, discard old beliefs and traditions that no longer serve us, and embrace community wherever we are fortunate enough to find, build, and nurture it” (p. xiii).

In Metamorphosis, you will find solar bikes, basic income for everyone, plans for rewilding, hydrogardens, solar lights, regenerative farming, community gardens, gift economies, and guaranteed housing, health care, education and food. There is advanced technology, but it works in collaboration with the humans who created it and facilitates a more sustainable future. As utopian as this sounds, the challenge of achieving these developments is not underestimated or ignored.

In “Cabbage Koora: A Prognostic Autobiography” by Sanjana Sekhar, which details the lives of a diasporic Indian family seeking to preserve their traditions and connections with one another, the transition to a more sustainable future is not straightforward: “The question of who pays for this transition, what carbon taxes get charged or credited and to whom, and who leads the proposed solutions that take the place of the old order… Well, it’s been a thorny time. But it’s also a time of inspired experimentation” (p. 126). In other words, the solutions—and their implementation—aren’t perfect. Thinking of ambitious plans proposed in our contemporary society—the Green New Deal in the United States or the European Green Deal in Europe—these questions sound familiar. They are the ones asked to the politicians and governments behind the proposals: Who will pay? Who will benefit and who will lose out? What values or beliefs are being promoted through these policies? Sekhar explores the complexity of answering these questions in “Cabbage Koora,” but she does so optimistically. In her story, even though there are challenges—like funding, which is a “constant issue for these initiatives” (p. 126)—humans are still on track to get it right, because they are committed to a vision of what can be.

The stories in Metamorphosis also address the devastating realities caused by climate change, including the fact that many of its effects cannot be quickly reversed. Resilience is an essential component of a climate-changed future, and loss, grief, and anger remain present and deeply rooted emotions. In “To Labor for the Hive” by Jamie Liu, a beekeeper forms an unlikely friendship over text with a support person collecting research on how bees can serve as an early warning system for floods. In one of their conversations, the beekeeper, Huaxin, expresses frustration over humanity’s past failures.

HUAXIN: We made the mess that’s making you have to do this whole early warning thing, right?

HUAXIN: selfishly polluting and not caring about nature

SUPPORT: We also realized our mistakes and put ourselves on the path to healing the planet. Isn’t that a good redemption arc? (p. 24)

Like countless generations before, humans continue to write the story of humanity. Our actions and choices shape the plot and craft the narrative arc. In this conversation between Huaxin and the support person, the weight of those decisions—and inevitable faults and wrongdoings—are laid bare. Yet the support person’s response offers compassion: true, humans have lived and exploited selfishly in the past, but that doesn’t mean they have to choose that same path, that same story, for the future.

These ideas of regret, of past missteps, and of the desire for redemption are explored even more poignantly in Louis Evans’s “A Seder in Siberia,” which examines a Jewish family living in Siberia as a consequence of the climate crisis. During the family’s Passover celebration, a long-lost son returns after attempting to secure his family’s repatriation in Texas. He brings with him knowledge of the real reason behind their family’s exile, something the father had hidden from them—that the father was not a victim of the climate crisis, but a perpetrator of atrocities in its wake.

Evans writes: “What happened in Texas was complicated. Drought in the Rio Grande. Crop failures across the Great Plains, from Nuevo-Leon to Iowa. Mass migration along several distinct axes. Dismemberment of the petrochemical industry. Rocket riots over Project Sunshade. Paramilitary violence and military violence…. System failures are as complicated as systems themselves” (p. 152).

In Evans’s story, there is not an easy redemption. The consequences of actions are not so easily reversed. Yet by acknowledging this, Evans opens up the door for a different, perhaps more grounded, understanding of the crisis we face—that we are responsible, that we do carry the consequences of our actions, and that redemption may not come right away. Still, we can be moved by the desire to act differently, and it again becomes a choice: whether one chooses to do as those who came before them or chooses to act differently than even those people they love. In these stories, Metamorphosis reveals how regret, loss, and grief—while experienced negatively—have the power to transform us.

I finished reading Metamorphosis the week that Hurricane Helene came ashore through the Gulf of Mexico, bringing unprecedented rainfall and destruction in six states across six hundred miles—including the state where I currently reside, North Carolina. Fueled by record-breaking warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico, Helene destroyed houses, businesses, roads, towns, and cities. Like Dario in “Accensa Domo Proximi,” countless people looked on as the waters rose and their homes washed away.

The attention to the destruction caused by Hurricane Helene is pointed and widespread—Google “Hurricane Helene, western North Carolina” and countless articles and Youtube videos will populate your screen. Yet whether this event will join the ranks of other natural disasters made worse by climate change but failing to catalyze climate action will be determined in the coming weeks, months and years. Alongside news of the disaster, though, stories are breaking through of the people who are there and who are helping one another to survive and to rebuild. There’s a donut shop I love in downtown Asheville that makes the best vegan donuts, and while they remain closed in Helene’s aftermath, they have rallied together with other small businesses to provide food, drinking water, hot meals, and even dog food to local residents. There is resilience here. There is compassion, community, and innovation. Amidst devastation, somehow the best of who we are—who we can be—is on display.

In “Seven Sisters” by Susan Kaye Quinn, a collective of women living and working together on a tea farm are struggling to make ends meet when they suddenly find themselves faced with the decision of whether or not to add another member to their commune. Questions of scarcity, of value, and of how family is defined scatter across the pages. Ultimately, though, it is the power of community that prevails, rooted in hope as a foundation of resilience. As one of the characters reflects, “Hope was no kind of business strategy, but it kept you moving through hard times, waiting on better ones. And family—your chosen ones, your vow, and your love for one another—was what carried you through” (p. 54). This sense of hope, this sense of community, is what I’ve seen alongside the devastation as people come together to rebuild from Hurricane Helene.

For me, it is in showing readers what is possible if we make the decision to change that is the true magic of Metamorphosis. Yeong-cheol, the artist in “Accensa Domo Proximi,” speaks to the crowd that has gathered around him.

Accensa domo proximi, tua quoque periclitatur…. It’s unattributed, but a powerful line. ‘When the house of your neighbor burns, your own home is likewise in danger.’ A millenia-old phrase, passed down through generations. And yet not something our collective human society managed to internalize, at least in certain arenas, until recently. (p. 119)

With the words “until recently,” the narrative of disaster shifts from one of destruction and despair, to one of change and growth; to one that holds the global community of human beings accountable for their actions and what happens to their neighbors; to one that shows we still have the capacity to care if we choose to. At its core, this is what Metamorphosis does—it changes the story from one of hopelessness and apathy to one of action and opportunity.

While Metamorphosis doesn’t shy away from the complicated nature of climate change and our culpability, the stories remain resolutely forward-looking and forward-thinking. Readers of this anthology will travel to both near and far futures, to locations ranging from California and Mexico, to Siberia and the Caribbean. Once there, they will find relationships, communities, and innovation, all rooted in principles of sustainability, inclusivity and justice. Each story is crafted with beautiful and compelling prose, and while painting vastly different futures, they remain in conversation with one another—building on ideas and providing a kaleidoscopic array of possibilities.

Metamorphosis travels through time to futures that we desire and can aspire toward, chipping away at deeply rooted cynicism. And as the climate crisis continues to unfold with devastating consequences around the globe, the urgent need for stories like the ones found in this anthology is increasingly apparent. As a species, as a collective community, there is a longing for the kind of hopeful climate fiction these stories offer, for narratives that give us different ideas, different dreams, different inspirations. We want stories that show us what is possible rather than what currently is. And anticipating readers’ protests that change is messy and complicated, the authors ask us—artfully and subtly—to tap into the reservoirs of strength we inherently hold: relying on one another, on our communities, and on our capacity for love and innovation to collectively pursue a sustainable future. As Rae Mariz writes in “The Imperfect Blue Marble,” a story about a child who has an affinity for marbles made by a local glassmaker, “See, storytellers are time travelers. Always have been” (p. 169).

The storytellers in Metamorphosis are the time travelers of our era, and the work done by Grist and their Imagine 2200 team to bring this project to fruition has uplifted the genre of climate fiction by allowing readers the chance to imagine a future that does not end in the inevitable destruction of humankind and the planet. As the oceans rise and the world warms, as species go extinct and people are forced out of their homes, each moment carries the weight of our decisions: whether we choose to act, or choose to look away.

I will return to Metamorphosis in the coming months and years as a reminder of what is possible and of what my role can be in transforming that possibility into reality, what role all of us can play in creating a different future. In the words of a wise character in “Cabbage Koora: A Prognostic Autobiography”: “Our survival is predicated on our ability to work together” (p. 134).

Syr Beker

If you’ve ever found yourself thirsting for a pond, maybe you can relate: since middle school, I have been taught to believe in certain prerequisites for being an artist. You need, first, solitude; second, peace of mind, usually defined as someone else doing your laundry; third, your own place, preferably by a pond. We were shown Landscape Art and given Nature Poetry, with nature defined as an external place you could go to extract inspiration and landscape defined as the world, how much it pleases you (srsly, those lily pads, perfect 10). While species after species were going extinct, entire sections of the biophonic choir folding up their hymnals and calling it a day, I was encouraged to look up the definitions of copse, crag, and thicket for the sake of there-will-be-a-test. Because I (maybe you too), was queer, an artist, inept at my assigned gender, neurofabulous, etc, and therefore a bundle of unnameable wants, what I thought I wanted at the time was the thing offered to me. I wanted a damn pond of my own.

Now that the world is fully on fire, the biophonic choir going alarmingly minimalist, and every kind of grief (personal, societal, human, ecological, planetary) dominating our feeds, I want something else. I want to know how you make art when you’re mortal, grieving, furious, and crisping at the edges. I need books about finding home, resistance, and belonging in our shifting climate. I want stories that are wild enough to match living in this moment. And I want something to rise out of the pond/forest/ocean and fight back.

Green Fuse Burning, a magnificent and chilling swampcore/eco-horror novella by Tiffany Morris out of Stelliform Press1, plays in these muddy waters and delivers. Morris, a L’nu’skw (Mi’kmaw) writer from Nova Scotia, opens Green Fuse with an art gallery announcement for a new show: the recovered paintings of Mi’kmaq painter Rita Francis, who mysteriously disappeared during her residency in a cabin on a pond. Each subsequent chapter begins with the gallery’s description of one of the paintings. The descriptions suggest clues about what happened to Rita: she used elements of the pond in her work; she painted tortured figures; what is this red sticky stuff on the canvas? The painting descriptions provide a frame for the chapters in which we get to experience Rita’s residency, the moments up to her disappearance, in real time.

The heart of the book is Rita’s grief, which Morris renders alongside Rita’s climate change sadness as a loss of psychic habitat. Rita is reeling from the recent loss of her father. Her grief is tied to a sense of alienation: the loss, not only of her father, but of connection with Mi’kmaw language and culture. Her father’s funeral is in “prayers her tongue couldn’t shape” without either the full grasp of the Mi’kmaw language, or the religious background of her cousins or brother who grew up on the rez (p. 12). Rather than hold space for her grief, Rita’s white and slightly toxic girlfriend, Molly—freshly back from an MLM retreat in Bali—submits Rita’s art to a fellowship in a frenzy of positive thinking, and wins her a residency out by a pond, in nature, air quotes. This next detail says it all: Molly remembers going “down to the shore” of that pond during childhood summers (p. 22). Rita knows “the Mi’kmaq people were forced off the land.” Still, she goes. Maybe she can paint. Maybe nature will do her good. Maybe she can be the sunny productive artist her girlfriend wants her to be. If this were a never have I ever, I’m betting some of us would be taking a sip.

Rita carries the awareness that her art retreat is on her ancestors’ stolen land, but she nevertheless “imagin[es] herself painting in swaths of golden light each day, reading by candlelight, heating her food on a woodstove” (p. 16). Of course, almost immediately, out by the swamp, something in the night’s like: “BUMP!” Stuck between despair and the desire to create, eventually Rita wanders into the mud and experiences an encounter. Not quite a haunting, not quite a monster. Let’s just say that looking for belonging and inspiration, she finds it in the arms of the swamp.

Green Fuse Burning asks who gets to have the idealized art retreat experience? I know this question. A few years ago, I too was lucky to win a fellowship to write in nature with a friend and collaborator. We drove to the place where they said there would be woods and found “No Trespassing” signs and a redundancy of U.S. flags. When we stopped for gas, several white men in flannel shirts wandered up from their trucks. They put their hands on the hood of our car and leaned in, surrounding us. “We just wanted to make sure you felt welcome,” they said, unsmiling.

As soon as Rita arrives in a place where the names have all been replaced, she encounters racism of the “We weren’t expecting you to come here . . . .” variety (emphasis mine, p. 24). When this happens to QT/BIPOC/disabled/femme artists on art retreats in nature, should we consider these men/settlers/racists part of our landscape, or do we photoshop them out?2

Maybe the real horror is that in capitalism, there is occupied land that is set aside for contemplation. Some people are allowed to access it by application.3 Green Fuse Burning reminds me that an artist retreat is the restriction of a resource that should belong to everyone: land, time, art, space. Before there was a Thoreau Gift Shop where you can buy mugs that say “all good things are wild and free,” the pond (re)named Walden had history as a place where formerly enslaved people tried to build a life of freedom. Before that, ~12,000 years of Native American cohabitation, and before that, it simply existed, birthed by icebergs. Now, climate change and the impact of half a million visitors a year threaten its very existence as a pond.4

Green Fuse Burning also engages with the question of nature, art, landscape, and self as separate. The title conjures a coming riot of swamp-revenge, the explosion of the idea that we are separate from nature, the swamp, the cycles of life. But there is a secondary meaning: fuse, become. Midway through the residency, Rita looks in the mirror and finds a vision of the swamp: “the usually familiar shapes of her face not making sense, not cohering into a memory of herself . . . her hair a tangle of gnarled branches and her cheeks smudged pools of sludge” (p. 53). Morris is also a poet (Elegies of Rotting Stars, Nictitating Books, 2022), and it shows in her jaw-droppingly lush imagery. When she comes to these places, she throws down, with language soaked in life. You’ll want to read slowly, sink into it like so much mud, mouth open to salt and grit and lichen.

~ Spoilers below ~

The explosion of Green Fuse Burning is what you don’t see in the paintings: Rita’s encounter with Lichen Woman, a kind of hypernatural embodiment of the swamp. The scene with Lichen Woman is so muddy, sexy, swampy and alive, it could be one of my favorite descriptions in any book last year. Dripping, marshy, lichenous, earning the “core” in swampcore with glorious muddy vibes of grief and rebirth and resilience. This encounter leads to the triumph of the book and to the equation at the center of so much great horror: There is a monster. The monster is me. I will fight back.

Rita survives and is found. She gets to attend her art opening and give an artist talk. This is where I admit, as one reader, that the book and I diverted. I didn’t want Rita to return and give a speech, even a great one, to her community and her now-ex. I wanted to imagine her happily out there in the swamp, covered in mud, wild, hand-in-hand with Lichen Woman, helping settler homes sink into the bogs. And yes, I know this is quite Sapphic of me. If I disappear, you know where to look.

~ End of spoilers. ~

The good news is that the swamp endures. Because being human and being vulnerable to grief does not end. Because Death, Life, Mud—it’s part of us. And, more importantly, because there is something out there still, something that can’t be killed or sectioned off or painted. Something that will surely take us down with it or carry on gleefully without us, but if we’re very, very lucky, it will take us in.

I, for one, love a swamp that fights back. Give me eco-horror over any other climate change genre. I want the frogs to win. Spiritually, I know time to be circular and iterative, but I want land to be petty and vengeful. Give me the satisfying revenge of that final panel in a Tales from the Crypt comic, but it’s Earth laughing and Humanity crying no, mercy, we didn’t mean to, it wasn’t our fault. Eco-horror, as a genre, doesn’t care for the despair of Dennis Quaid just trying to rescue his son while the superstorm comes. Eco-horror doesn’t need you to reach some Overstory-esque sympathy for life forms that aren’t us, because nature wins—you don’t need pity from things you’ve pwned. Eco-horror is my favorite kind of queer aesthetic because it replaces extinction with extra. Take the heartbreak of climate change and give me a hundred frogs, a thousand moths, and mud that doesn’t care about your attachment issues. It’s the lichen curling around your ankle as you try to walk away. It’s the thing out there that’s worth fighting for because it can’t be killed.

As Eco-Horror and Swampcore both, Green Fuse has everything you could want: there is plenty mud, there is a hyperabundance of moths so well rendered I batted my hands around, there is a spitting-up-frogs scene so graphic I still can’t eat pickles. There are bioluminescent mushrooms. There is what she, Rita, wanted: “a language of her own on a secret part of the land. Her own suckerfish writing, her essence in the mud” (p. 90).

Green Fuse Burning contributes to making 2023 a great year, at least when it comes to eco-horror and indigenous eco-horror, alongside other titles like Bad Cree, Never Whistle at Night, and more. It’s also been a good publication year for swamps, marshes, and wetlands. Consider Annie Proulx’s Fen, Bog, and Swamp, B. Pladek’s excellent Dry Land 5, Grant Chemidlin’s What We Lost in the Swamp, and Nomeda Urbonas et al’s Swamps and the New Imagination (2024). Something is speaking to us from the pond. As Morris writes in the acknowledgments, “Wetlands are devalued for the same reason that death and trauma are ignored . . . we do not see the importance of holding space for pain or holding the literal space of the swamp, even though both are about life itself. Even though they help other areas of life thrive.”

Maybe in our grief, we’re craving what’s messy. Maybe we’re needing filtration systems to sift the information overload. Maybe we want mud because it marks us, like glitter off that queer on the dance floor, as part of this joyous, fractious messiness of the world we are part of. Maybe, covered in mud, we can crawl out and reclaim something that should belong to all of us. Green Fuse Burning is dedicated “to those in the swamps.” I for one have been in the swamps a lot this year, for better or worse. Maybe you have too. Maybe I’ll see you out there. We can mud wrestle.

Content Warnings for Green Fuse Burning: Suicidal ideation, anti-indigenous racism, grief, loss of a family member, loneliness.

1. Stelliform is a Canadian press promoting intersectional views of environmental justice, with a mission to “resha[pe] nature/culture relationships through the stories we tell ourselves and each other.” Their books come in eye-catching covers, like the cover of Green Fuse Burning by artist Chief Lady Bird: chartreuse, hot pink, and luminous, like moonlight on a mutating swamp.

2. If you’re not QT/BIPOC/Femme/Disabled and think you can just ignore this kind of thing and focus on your art, or if your eyeballs need a dose of WTF, allow me to direct you to Alex Garland’s 2022 film Men.

3. For a triumphant counter, read E.C. Barrett’s Swimming Whole.

4. This is not an inevitability. For a story of a lake’s resilience, restoration, and returning, read Vivian Underhill’s The Return of Pa’ashi, Colonial Unknowing and California’s Tulare Lake (2023).

5. Editor’s note: Find Bogi Takács’s review of Dry Land for Reckoning here.

Redfern Jon Barrett

Sometimes I like to fantasize about how I’d cope with the end of the world—or, at least, the end of our relatively comfortable and stable society. I’m hardly a doomsday prepper, and I’m pretty sure that my gangly, over-friendly self would barely last a few days into the apocalypse, but it’s a fascinating hypothetical for two reasons: firstly, because the climate crisis brings the possibility that we may someday actually have to face this as a reality, and secondly, because it prompts a certain amount of self-reflection. What is your capacity for self-reliance, for cooperation with others, and ultimately, how is your mental and physical resilience? Even if you’re lucky enough to have your own fully-stocked bunker, would your values, connections, and integrity survive intact?

This is the scenario faced by Kit, protagonist and narrator of Natasha Calder’s first solo novel, Whether Violent or Natural. As I’d previously reviewed her excellent co-written work, The Offset, which deals with environmental catastrophe in the form of climate change, I was eager to explore her latest take on the apocalypse.

Written from a unique first-person perspective, it’s obvious from the outset that something is wrong. Dwelling in an abandoned bunker beneath a crumbling castle, Kit’s extensive study of encyclopaedias combine with her complete lack of socialisation to create a deeply unsettling voice:

Even the stars are still and silent, not singing to me like they sometimes do on a cloudless night, not twinkling out their astral boasts for all to read and weep. I don’t mind. Stars don’t stay quiet for long, not if they can help it, swanking vanities that they are. (p. 9)

Reminiscent of Jeanette Winterson’s poetic outcasts, Kit is eloquent yet disconnected, quick-witted yet naive, knowledgeable while at the same time deeply ignorant. And she isn’t alone.

We’re also introduced to Crevan, a seemingly grumpy and much less verbose individual whose quirks are no less odd. From the outset Kit introduces Crevan as ‘paranoid,’ ‘delusional,’ and ‘deranged,’ though his role seems to be that of Kit’s guardian. We’re left with a great many questions as to their relationship, and though Crevan appears to be a grown man, Kit’s wide-eyed sense of wonder and childish temper tantrums leave her age ambiguous. The two are platonic, and sleep in separate rooms, yet whether Crevan is father, mentor, or friend is left to the reader to decode:

But maybe he is as frightened as I am, as disturbed and as put out. Maybe it’s even worse for him than it is for me. Maybe when he says that I’m panicked, that I need to get a grip, I really should be the one saying it to him. Maybe taking care of me gives him a way to take care of himself too. (p. 50)

The bond between these two troubled individuals drives the story, and was the main draw that kept me turning page after page. There’s a constant, ever-present distance between the two, but their maladapted affection for one another is compelling, and our perceptions of each are played with throughout the entire story.

So why are these two alone in a bunker together? Like The Offset, Calder’s latest novel presents us with an environmental apocalypse and subsequent social collapse; yet while The Offset gave us a world ravaged by carbon, Whether Violent or Natural’s reality is formed via microbes. Like many, I’ve long been terrified of growing antibiotic resistance, lamenting the mass feeding of antibiotics to cattle and people taking them for the common cold. I’m not alone in this fear, and Calder exploits such a scenario to its fullest potential:

It is our fault, you know, entirely our fault—we have been tempting fate for years; we use our precious antibiotics recklessly, extravagantly, behaving as though they are an endless panacea, a bottomless well of clean water that may be dipped into as much and as often as we please. We are profligate like you wouldn’t believe. (p. 55)

Unable to cope with runaway infections of all kinds, urban life and medical institutions collapse. Yet I don’t believe this familiar vision of apocalypse—one of ruin, dysfunction, and violence—is truly the point of the novel. Calder’s work gets to something deeper, and more personal.

Whether Violent or Natural’s central theme is ultimately the breakdown of trust. Firstly, our reckless use of lifesaving medications and the resulting environmental upheaval causes a collapse in trust on a wider societal level: institutions require trust to operate. When medical science fails the population, the population stops trusting medical specialists. In this chaos, doctors are something to be hated and feared, and it seems absolutely no coincidence that Calder wrote this story during the global pandemic. Yet while our world saw fear spread via disinformation, the failures which bring about the world of Calder’s novel are very real—a result of wider societal hubris when it comes to our planet’s microbial ecosystems.

However, this breakdown in trust isn’t limited to medical establishments. The abuse of antibiotics and their resultant failure causes a collapse in wider societal cohesion. Kit’s grown up in a world that equates trust with danger. She lives in hiding because the outside world isn’t safe for her, so when an unconscious woman washes to the shore of Kit’s island, Kit is convinced that she represents a very real threat, giving us one of my favourite quotes from the novel: “‘We can’t keep her,’ I croak. ‘It’s strictly no pets’” (p. 23). Kit doesn’t even trust the grumpy Crevan, and despite their proximity she maintains a vast mental and emotional distance from him. Kit’s general lack of trust in turn devastates her own humanity.

So far, so apocalyptic. I mean, it’s common for post-collapse worlds to lack this sense of social trust. It would be easy to stop here, but Calder takes the concept further. Though Kit is an extremely knowledgeable and entertaining narrator, her poor mental health and lurid fantasy life also make her an unreliable one. Having lost her family and everyone she knew in her old life, her intense trauma and lack of healthy socialisation have led to a loose grasp of reality, and thereby impact her inner narrative. The breakdown in trust takes place on all levels, from the societal to the deeply personal. Not only has trust broken down between the people and their authorities, as well as with one another, but we can’t even trust the words we’re presented with on the page.

I feel like I’ve written the world ‘trust’ fifty times in the past few paragraphs, but growing up in a stable Western society, it’s easy to take trust for granted. We trust that the streets will be maintained. That our packages will be delivered. That we’re safe passing a stranger in the street. We trust new people, and invite them into our lives as potential friends, neighbours, lovers. Yet, as we’ve seen over the past few years, particularly in the wake of the pandemic, all this trust is eroded by instability. It doesn’t matter if that instability is brought about by disease or via the climate catastrophe. Destroying our environmental security destroys what is arguably our most important human asset.

Yet trust isn’t all that’s eroded here. We also get glimpses into the silver linings of social collapse – namely the lack of social expectation. One scene which stuck out for me as a big old nonbinary person was Kit’s lack of perceived gender:

…I had the island to myself for ever such a long time. There was no one to affront, no one to offend. No one to map me out and say: You are like this, you should be like that. No one to say: But you are a woman and I am a man, it is improper. To tell the truth, I’d forgotten there were such things as men and women before Crevan arrived, forgotten there were such divisions and categories to know and learn. I still struggle to remember it now—or rather, struggle to remember how they apply to me. I am just myself. I have always been just myself. (p. 40)

It’s a brief and relatively minor moment in the novel, but it’s one which really stuck with me, if for no other reason than the fact that it simply and elegantly lays out how I feel about my own gender identity. Though Whether Violent or Natural grapples with wider issues, it’s also filled with these small moments in which Calder thoughtfully speculates on the personal and psychological outcomes of collapse, going beyond pure negativity and horror.

Just as the reader settles into the setting, the plot undergoes a significant twist—and Kit’s status as an unreliable narrator is confirmed when we discover exactly how much she’s been keeping from us. As we aren’t told the whole story until this point, it makes it extremely difficult to cover in a review without spoiling the text, but I’ll do my best. It’s too integral to the overall story to be avoided.

Kit eventually reveals her own past. Her parents, medical researchers grappling with the advent of antibiotic resistance, discovered what is essentially the antidote. However, mass death had already ensued and the social damage had been done. The true infection was distrust, and though doctors were ready to administer the cure, by this point much of the public simply didn’t want it. Kit’s family became a target of those who were clinging to superstition, folk cures, and scapegoating—with Kit herself disfigured by mob violence. Her island refuge was no accident. Though she has every reason to distrust the mainland, we don’t know the full extent of the supposed apocalypse.

So how is this a book tackling the impact of apocalyptic environmental change if there’s potentially no apocalypse? This is the mystery which emphasizes the novel’s deeper theme. As with climate change and global pandemics, we absolutely have the ability to avoid catastrophe, but we’re held back by social obstacles—namely, disinformation and distrust. We can only implement solutions when we have mutual cooperation and a shared narrative. To what extent the world outside Kit’s island has collapsed depends on how far violence and superstition have spread, and it’s here that Whether Violent or Natural truly shines, showing us the intimate connection between social bonds and environmental challenges. In the end, trust is the scarcest resource, and the apocalypse becomes a certainty once we’ve exhausted it.

Upending the story in its later stages does muddy things, and we lose some of the terrifying wonder we’re presented with earlier on. Though some might find the redirected plot unsatisfying, I appreciate the ambiguity: to what extent the world has collapsed depends on the reader’s interpretation, and is ultimately rooted in our own optimism or cynicism. I particularly enjoyed the final pages, which end on an unsettling note befitting the mood we’ve been presented with from the very start.

As Calder’s first solo novel, I wasn’t sure what to expect from Whether Violent or Natural. Yet the strong narrative voice delighted me, immediately drawing me in to this dark vision of a post-antibiotic apocalypse, while continuing to claw at my attention via the twisted bond between Kit and Crevan. I was hooked to the last page. Not all readers will connect to the novel’s later stages, particularly those looking for a plot centered around unambiguous environmental collapse. But what we have instead is a thoughtful exploration of what is lost when we treat technology so carelessly—specifically the damage wrought to social bonds on all levels—and I found it an extremely worthwhile read.

Catherine Rockwood

Claire G. Coleman’s debut novel, Terra Nullius, is a difficult and powerful book set in an Australia under occupation. It starts in medias res with the flight from slavery of a young Native man named Jacky. This sequence may seem historically familiar, as may the word “Native.” But Terra Nullius contains a revision of perspective at about the 120 page-mark that shifts its genre solidly to science fiction and unmoors our understanding of what’s meant by both “Native” and the antithetical term “Settler.”

Before that sudden change, the novel follows Jacky’s escape toward what he hopes may be the family and home-territory he was taken from as a child. We witness his grueling evasion of recapture by Settler forces and are introduced to the colonialist systems that produce Native immiseration and unfreedom. These systems extend from malicious functionaries, like “The Head of the Department for the Protection of Natives,” to established religious orders. In search of his past, Jacky briefly and dramatically returns to the nunnery-run residential school where he spent his youth before being sold out to work as a slave. The “school” is presided over by the violently racist Sister Bagra, who lives with an uneasy awareness that she mustn’t allow HQ to find out about her institution’s growing graveyard for Native children.

In this initial phase of Terra Nullius we are also introduced to a Settler storm-trooper named Johnny Star, who revolts against the terms of his own service after he witnesses a massacre of unequally armed Native civilians. Glimmers of resistance to the colonial project begin to come into view, as Johnny joins up with a group of armed Native outlaws headed by a young man named Tucker, and the outlaws become aware of the existence of a precarious Native settlement that has so far evaded Settler notice. The settlement is a roughly democratic body, and one of the most effective people in it is a young woman named Esperance who will play a major role in the final action of the novel.

Soon, Jacky’s path will intersect with these other parties. Soon, they will all move toward self-defense, toward reluctant exemplarity, toward giving hope and rage to the oppressed.

So far, we could be reading an unsparing historical novel about colonial Australia. But this is where, if you don’t want spoilers about Terra Nullius, you should stop reading. Because next I have to talk about the big plot-reveal.

The big plot reveal is an interstellar invasion. It is by definition a surprise (there’s a grim joke to be made here about nobody expecting an invasion) but quickly makes all kinds of sense for the book’s accomplished conjuring of the apocalyptic Australian Indigenous experience of settler colonialism. Terra Nullius uses the genre-shock of its space-alien invasion to surprise white readers into seeing their own history as rapacious ‘alien’ history, while speaking with understanding and truth to readers personally impacted by the effects of colonialism about their own lived experience.

In pursuit of both of these goals, Coleman employs speculative metaphors that touch on the environmental toll of colonialism—its recklessly introduced new species, its indifferent disruption of existing ecosystems. Searching for water, Jacky must crawl on his belly beneath an invasive alien vine with poisonous thorns. The vine marks the presence of a stream, without which the plant could not survive, but also bars the water from use by any but the most desperate. “If [Jacky] was slow, meticulous and careful, if he dug down into the mud and muck when he needed to, if he was lucky, he might make it into the gully the vine was strangling” (p. 173). And back out again? It’s hard work for a Native to live, in every direction.

Terra Nullius came out in 2017. It’s still timely, in ways not particularly pleasant to think about, but which are—that dreaded word—useful. Some things about the way Terra Nullius has been received, though, suggest that not all of what it’s saying has been…accepted? Noted? Here’s what may be the problem: Terra Nullius is super clear about the fact that the alien invasion has wiped out all sense of racial distinction between humans. And yet, there seems to be a tendency for reviewers to identify the main human characters in this book as Indigenous. I assumed they were too, at first.

Here’s the book, on its own terms:

The arrival of [the aliens] had eliminated all racism and hate within the human species. It was not that with a common enemy the humans decided to work together…[i]nstead the colonization by the Settlers simply ended all discrimination within the human race by taking away all the imbalance…With no distinction between humans, no rights, no countries, the human race was in the process of homogenization. (p. 159)

It’s a strong universalizing statement and not every reader of the book is going to like it. Coleman is resolute, though: in the future world of her novel, no human really cares about race anymore. Terra Nullius argues that conditions under colonial occupation by an offworld power are simply too equally bad for race to matter as a distinguishing factor.1 But I think a lot of readers find it literally unbelievable, for varied and interesting reasons, that a science fiction novel written by an Aboriginal author about the ravages of colonialism would feature white people among its main sympathetic protagonists. And yet, that’s what Terra Nullius does.

Here’s a different reviewer’s description of the leadership of the novel’s Native (i.e. human) outlawry:

Juxtaposed against…the alien invasion as colonial project is a nomadic group of Aboriginal outlaws. . .These “lost souls” are led by the courageous Aboriginal woman Esperance and her grandfather.2

“[T]he courageous Aboriginal woman Esperance.” But Coleman specifically states that Esperance, who at the end of Terra Nullius eponymously holds what little remains of the novel’s hope, is white. Here she is, up early in the remote woods that have been her community’s fragile sanctuary:

She liked the peace, she liked to hunt before the sun hit the sky – it was cooler and more comfortable on her skin that humans had called ‘white’ before the [aliens] came, before skin colour became irrelevant. (p. 257)

In sum, Terra Nullius is an anti-colonial novel in which white people undergo, together with Indigenous, Black and Brown people, the full unthrottled murderous experience of being colonized. And at least one white person ends up taking on the fugitive heroic role of survivor and resister that I think we are more used to seeing Indigenous, Black and Brown characters take on (for good reason) in recent dystopian fiction. But the totally equalizing aspect of Coleman’s racial world-building contradicts some readers’ expectations to such an extent that it’s almost hard for us to see what she’s written, even though the words are right there on the page. Personally, I wonder if the idea of a “homogenized” humanity was hard for me to focus on while reading Terra Nullius because I—a white demigirl, for what it’s worth—find it too grim to imagine a world where we’re so beaten down, deracinated, overworked and information-poor that we can’t argue and worry, discuss and fight and care and learn about racial history anymore. “But for us to get there we’d have to be living in hell on earth,” I think. To which Coleman’s novel says, “Yes.”

1. For a longer review that grapples with this aspect of Coleman’s novel from an Aboriginal perspective, see: https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/review/terra-nullius-claire-coleman/

2. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/they-do-not-come-in-peace-on-claire-g-colemans-terra-nullius

Bogi Takács

Pladek’s debut novel, Dry Land, is a historical fantasy set in the First World War, focusing on an uncommon topic in fantasy literature: forestry. In addition to its environmental and war themes, and its careful engagement with queer realities, Dry Land also offers a refreshing take on magic. Yet perhaps most importantly, Dry Land is a story about personal and social limits, some of which can be breached, others which can’t.

Rand is a young German American forester working as a surveyor in the forests of Wisconsin, while the First World War rages in Europe. Rand has been involved in environmental activism since he was a teen, including working on a famous, failed project to revitalize a marsh. He feels strongly about nature, but it still comes as a shocking development to him when he discovers that his touch can make plants grow.

His teammate and lover, the Mexican American surveyor Gabriel, has secrets of his own: as his evening fiddle playing makes obvious, he should be playing in concert halls, yet there he is in the woods, braving the muck and the damp. When Rand starts sneaking out at night, Gabriel initially assumes Rand is sleeping around… but in fact he is experimenting with his power.

His days grew stumbling. He yawned into his elbow and shouted the wrong signals to Gabriel, who frowned, though he said nothing.

But his nights were transcendent. The dark woods blossomed beneath his fingers. With each test he pushed himself harder. Despite his growing collection of pine scales, maple keys, and basswood nuts, he had started small, with whatever bulbs lay already dormant in the earth. After two nights of flowers he advanced to shrubs, raspberry canes and stalks of red dogwood; finally, in another three, to trees. His first spindly sugar maple took such a concentration of energy that he fainted briefly against it. (p. 13)

Magic as a plot element can be used as a writing shortcut to avoid detail; Pladek does the opposite and brings every bulb and pine scale into close focus. His caring, thick description of nature shows a deep awareness that Dry Land owes just as much to the Wisconsin landscape as his protagonist Rand. The novel is thoroughly researched—as the author mentions in the acknowledgements, he read early forestry manuals and field guides. Yet Dry Land isn’t only a novel about nature as much as it is embedded in nature.

Once Rand’s power is revealed, he finds himself pressed into participating in the American war effort—even though, as someone ethnically German, he is often viewed with suspicion. But Dry Land isn’t entirely a war novel either, even as Rand is shipped into Europe.

He did not begin seeing evidence of the front until the fields had risen into hills patched with woodland. The shellfire was now regular to the northeast. At some point he began following the signs—scoops of earth from old barrages, a biplane’s timber skeleton half sunk in mud, and men, on foot or pumping handcarts or queued before a field hospital, men lapping sluggishly back and forth like a gray tide.

As if he were surveying, he triangulated their flows and followed. (p. 106)

In the built environment of a large city, or amid the utter destruction of warfare, Rand’s gaze remains the forester’s, the naturalist’s, the surveyor’s.

Dry Land is also a queer novel. In present-day terms, Rand would probably be considered bisexual, his lover Gabriel gay, and his best friend, the socialist activist Jonna, a lesbian woman alongside her partner Marie. The characters struggle against the queer-exclusionary nature of the setting; from raids on bars to gay bashing, from the terror of the military to internalized oppression. As Jonna tells Rand: “I thought I was like you, and could make myself take the easy way out. But then, you’re doing it the hard way anyway.” (p. 76-77)

Every character finds their way differently in this world, but all of the paths they take are presented with an intimate, yet not voyeuristic attention. Without describing the plot in detail, the book takes this approach in a more general sense too—never lingering on the violence, but not ignoring it either, and showing a rich internality of experiencing it. At one point, this includes a death wish as tangible as it is unfetishized.

In more than one sense, Dry Land is about limits. Rand rapidly comes up against the limitations of his magic and, throughout the novel, struggles with whether these limitations can be overcome through sheer effort, careful planning, or in some other way. Often they can’t. I found this both relatable on a personal level and refreshing. In fantasy, such limits are often laboriously spelled out with ‘laws’ of magic, but Pladek’s comes across as a more realistic approach, matching the general realism of the narrative.

Rand thinks of himself as a scientist, not a magician. He’s also a proponent of John Muir’s idea of preservation, advocating for preserving the natural “wilderness” as opposed to managing it for human ends, including industrial exploitation. But in the course of the novel, Rand finds out about the limits of science, too: “He’d thought he was being a good scientist. But nothing about his gift had ever been solved by this sort of science.” (p. 149)

His foil and antagonist Dr. Manning, the eugenicist doctor assigned to supervise him in the military, presents obvious, easy-to-reject views of science with his talk of “breeding” and “degeneracy.” Yet Rand himself has more subtle biases that go to the core of who he is and what he does: “He was a scientist; he should have known conservation was not accomplished deus ex machina.” (p. 217) He considers in detail what he sees, but he ignores what he doesn’t, what he is—in the most literal meaning of the word—segregated from seeing. Being a German American during WWI, he experiences sometimes physically violent ethnocentrism as one of “the enemy” and is at the same time able to take advantage of his own whiteness. All this is shown thoughtfully, unfolding step by step, drawing the reader in.

The ecological and the human all intertwine. What is “wilderness” and what is people’s role in interacting with it? Why is American environmentalism often tinged with the messianic, and what happens when magic enters the equation? Dry Land presents complication, difficulty, escape and not-escape; and the book leaves plenty of room for us to agree or disagree with Rand’s decisions. I have already read it twice while writing this review, and I’m confident it will reward even further rereads.

This is a thinky, reflective novel, with plenty of interiority and an avoidance of common fantasy plot beats. You won’t necessarily know where the plot will go, and it’s not the “hero’s journey” omnipresent in present-day Anglo-American storytelling. For all his magic, Rand isn’t a hero and the plot isn’t an extended training montage. It is something much, much closer to life, with all its pain and sense of wonder. It reflects on genre publishing—and not favorably—that this book came out from a university press, and for this reason it might be less noticed. I for one will continue telling people about it, and at the risk of employing the cliché: this is one of the not-to-miss speculative novels of 2023.