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.
