Dan Bloom's Reading List

"Because it’s top-flight storytelling, written by a seasoned pro. It wasn’t published six years ago as a ‘cli-fi’ novel, and Kingsolver herself never called it that. The novel isn’t about global warming per se. It’s a fable, a poetic fable, with a strong cast of memorable characters. Whether you’re a woman or a man, the novel will resonate with you. The vision of the monarch butterflies at the beginning of the story is almost mystical, religious, spiritual. It’s pure storytelling with no false moves. What makes her book work for me was that it didn’t fall into the trap of being preachy. As a non-scientist, I loved the book and read it with the same page-turning excitement as I felt when I used to read novels when I was a teenager in the 1960s, when literature was still fresh and new to me. The chapters in Flight Behaviour about the climate denialists in the local community are powerful and get to the heart of the matter. This isn’t a novel using government statistics and scientific studies to preach to the choir: it goes for the reader’s EQ rather than her or his IQ. I liked that. All cli-fi books should be like this. I couldn’t stop reading, over a period of several days, as I entered Kingsolver’s world here in my apartment in Taiwan . She is pure genius. Kingsolver has lived in Africa – which was the setting for her 1998 novel The Poisonwood Bible – and she wrote Flight Behaviour while living in rural Virginia, so she knows a thing or two about the rich and the poor, and the haves and the have-nots. In this novel she explores class in rural America, and it’s not always a pretty picture. To answer your question, I might answer with a slight modification to novelist William Gibson’s often-quoted quip that ”the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed” to the effect that “climate activism is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.” So yes, the novel explores class in America, and class differences in the environmental movement. Kingsolver shines a light on this, and it’s illuminating."

"This book was published three years ago, and it’s interesting that it was set in both the past and the near future. The story is told in the third person and is divided into four sections, starting in 1984 then segueing to 1997, 2008 and what was then seen as the “near future” of 2018. Which is where we are today. It’s not a post-apocalyptic dystopian novel, far from it, and it tries to give readers a sense of hope rather than grind them down with doom and gloom. It’s a family drama, about white people in Australia living close to the land and sometimes visiting the big cities. It’s also about the indigenous people of that island continent, and Robinson is not afraid to look into the nation’s Aboriginal origins. And while Australia is far away from North America and Europe, the land is also beset by massive wildfires, floods and droughts, just like in California, France and Spain. Anchor Point means a safe harbour, and I feel that Robinson meant for her novel itself to be a safe harbour in the midst of gathering global storms that are linked now to climate change. The book seemingly appeared in Australia out of nowhere at the time, with the novel making small, hopeful literary waves in the country, but getting little recognition overseas in North America or Europe. It’s too bad because it’s a very good cli-fi novel and deserved a wider readership. I asked Alice by email about the book back in 2015. I wanted to know if she wrote the novel out of fear for an uncontrollable near future or as a book about grief. She told me: I am living in a culture here in Australia that has been incredibly slow, negligently slow, to come to terms with the reality of climate change. I feel that talking openly about the prospect of a perilous future in this nation is received as alarmist, unhinged, hysterical. In the long term, I feel profound grief over the loss of beautiful, magical places, plants and creatures in the world. It is a horrible consequence of taking climate change seriously that my encounters with nature now already feel somewhat nostalgic, even painful, as though the beauty of the world is fleeting, already lost to me. The book spans 35 years and it ends with the final chapter in 2018, when some massive bushfires begin to impact on big city dwellers as well as rural people. It’s written in a quiet, controlled way, and in many ways it does not read like a climate fiction novel at all. There are no lectures, there is no preaching, there are no long information dumps. Anchor Point is literary fiction, with the people and the land of the author’s native country forming the backdrop to her controlled storytelling. I loved reading this book."

"They think they are doing the right thing and have the right idea, but as millennials in a climate-impacted world they are “unprepared,” as the title aptly puts it. Notice the title is “We Are Unprepared,” rather than “We Are Not Prepared.” There’s a subtle difference. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter As the story unfolds, the couple and their friends find out that even in idyllic, rural, hippie Vermont, chaos, disintegration and mixed signals reign. Reilly’s book is a cli-fi novel of the current moment, set in the present. A major east coast storm, remnants of a hurricane, turns Vermont upside down. That’s a good way to put it. The very act of putting pen to paper is a kind of activism for some writers, yes. In Reilly’s case, earlier in her life she worked as a policy wonk in Washington DC in the Bill Clinton administration. There, she rubbed elbows with government officials, sat in on high-level staff meetings and socialized after work with power players with close ties to Clinton. Then she left the world of politics and Washington games, and decided to move to her native state of Vermont and write a novel. A climate-themed novel, it turned out, and the result was We Are Unprepared . She wanted to use literature, literary fiction, to make a difference, if books can ever really make a difference in society at large. So yes, like Robinson in Australia, Reilly was doing activism as literature. She did media interviews, went on a book tour and spoke as a guest author at Washington bookstores. The inside Washington policy wonk was now a book person, trading places to become a Washington outsider."

"Yes, Polar City Red was the first novel ever to be published and promoted explicitly as a cli-fi novel. I commissioned the novel back in 2010, to promote my work on the concept of ‘polar cities’ – with all credit and royalties going to Jim. To give the concept a literary handle, I asked Jim to write a novel under his own byline and with his own plot, timeframe and cast of characters, set in 2075. The only things I asked were that the book be about one such city in Alaska and that the title be Polar City Red . I was involved in promoting the idea that survival communities might be built in the far north of Alaska, Canada, Scandinavia and Russia in the event that future global warming impact events forced millions of climate refugees to those regions. The New York Times wrote about my concept back in 2008 . Jim had written several science fiction novels already; he accepted the commission and published the book in early 2012. I wrote dozens of press releases and op-eds calling the novel a ‘cli-fi thriller.’ Margaret Atwood was kind enough to tweet, and with her large Twitter following, word got around. So Jim’s book gave birth to the cli-fi term, and Atwood’s tweet solidified its ascent. Polar City Red is about a family of Americans who are forced to leave their home in Minnesota and make their way north to a pioneering polar city in northern Alaska, threatened daily by looters, marauders and survivalists living around the fortified perimeters of Polar City Red. Laughter’s novel was a hybrid of science fiction and climate fiction, and thanks to Polar City Red , we’re talking about cli-fi today. That’s why I consider it a pivotal book in the early history of climate fiction literature. It’s still available in paperback."

"I love, love, love this book. Here’s the elevator pitch: Four years ago, when Kleiner’s daughters were young, he worked with a fabulous illustrator to produce a 44-page children’s picture book – what I call the world’s first cli-fi picture book – about the danger CO2 poses to the planet. Notice the subtitle of the book is “A Story for Children and Their Adults.” So this is not just a book for kids but it’s also for their parents and their teachers to read and discuss with them at home or at school. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The conceit is: what if someone painted all the CO2 in the atmosphere pink, so that everyone could see it, and how it is overloading the atmosphere? Now, no children’s book is going to turn the tide on the fight against global warming impacts alone. But, on the other hand, what if this little book became an animated cartoon that was shared online worldwide and on TV? One never knows how children’s books travel in time. Look at how popular the Dr Seuss picture books became worldwide after the author died. Some literary critics even say that The Lorax was a cli-fi picture book that was way ahead of its time. I have to think that our descendants in 2118 might still be reading Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam trilogy, Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 , James Bradley’ s Clade , Claire Vaye Watkins’s Gold Fame Citrus , Ling Ma’s Severance and Nathaniel Rich’s Odds Against Tomorrow . And for sure, Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour and Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide."