On planet Turaset, droughts ravage farmlands, cyclones rip through coastal cities, and with every barrel of oil the combustion industry pumps from the ground, the climate worsens. Alphonse has just refused a council seat because taking it means serving that rapacious industry. He leaves the city to seek solace in […]
Read MoreFun Experiment: AI Writing Our Stories
I read an interesting article at LitHub yesterday that used an on online AI-bot to write more of some of the world’s classic novels based upon first sentences. I decided to use the same Transformer tool to see what its response would be to some of my favorite eco-fiction stories, […]
Read MoreAn Invite to Eternity, Gary Budden and Marian Womack, et al.
Humanity is facing a challenge if a magnitude ever before seen, compromising new anxieties we are at times unable to process. An Invite to Eternity is a collection of short story fiction that addresses this shift under the premise that speculative fiction, weird fiction, and dark horror are in a […]
Read MoreBridge 108, Anne Charnock
Bridge 108 is a “disturbing, near-future novel” about a young climate refugee who is trafficked into slavery in the north of England. It is described by Such as “a warm yet deeply heart-rending story about a boy who is too trusting and inevitably falls prey to malevolent forces on his long […]
Read MoreMountains Piled Upon Mountains, Edited by Jessica Cory
Click here to return to the series In November, we head to the USA, the first of the world eco-fiction travels to do so. Having spent a great amount of time in the Appalachian Mountains as a child (you can read more here), when I came across the anthology Mountains […]
Read MoreSarah R. Baughman’s The Light in the Lake
The Light in the Lake by Sarah R. Baughman (Little Brown, 2019) Middle Grade Fiction Review by Kimberly Christensen In rural Vermont, twins Addie and Amos lived at the edge of Maple Lake, a place that had been home to generations of their relatives. Everyone loved the lake, with its […]
Read MoreEco-Weird & Horror Themes in Literature and the Arts
Join us over at Facebook for a link a day–October 23 to November 2, the Day of the Dead. These stories show how eco-horror and eco-weird literature and other arts deal with both the uncanny and the real. The featured image is one I took at the Vancouver Climate Strike […]
Read MoreThe Hills Reply, Tarjei Vesaas
Translated by Elizabeth Rokkan Tarjei Vesaas’s final work before his death, this episodic novel drifts between dream-like abstraction and vivid description of seemingly ordinary yet heightened scenes of the Norwegian countryside. Goodreads Reviews Back to GoodReads
Read MoreTears of the Trufflepig, Fernando A. Flores
Near future. South Texas. Narcotics are legal and there’s a new contraband on the market: ancient Olmec artifacts, shrunken indigenous heads, and filtered animals—species of animals brought back from extinction to clothe, feed, and generally amuse the very wealthy. Esteban Bellacosa has lived in the border town of MacArthur long […]
Read MoreLion City, Ng Yi-Sheng
These are the exquisitely strange tales of Lion City, the first collection of short fiction by award-winning poet and playwright Ng Yi-Sheng. Infused with myth, magical realism and contemporary sci-fi, each of these tales invites the reader to see this city-state in a new and darkly fabulous light. Goodreads Reviews […]
Read MoreThe Dark Star Trilogy, Marlon James
The first volume of a promised trilogy, a fabulist reimagining of Africa, with inevitable echoes of Tolkien, George R.R. Martin and Black Panther, but highly original, its language surging with power, its imagination all-encompassing. . . . Marlon is a writer who must be read. –Salman Rushdie, TIME on Part […]
Read MoreDrive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Olga Tokarczuk
Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones (originally titled Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych). Man Booker International Prize Nominee (2019). Olga is also a Nobel prize winner in literature as well as the Nike in Poland. This tale of an elderly female eccentric investigating the murders of humans and animals in a remote forest […]
Read MoreDisappearing Earth, Julia Phillips
It’s possible, though, that novelists are responding to the effects of climate change in ways other than direct representation…Julia Phillips’s brilliant debut novel “Disappearing Earth” is what Jane Allison calls a “radial” narrative — one where some inciting incident creates ripples that move outward and often compound in complexity rather […]
Read MoreWolfe Island, Lucy Treloar
Part western, part lament for a disappearing world, Wolfe Island (set off the northeast coast of the US) is a transporting novel that explores connection and isolation and the ways lives and families shatter and are remade. Goodreads Reviews Back to GoodReads
Read MoreThree Ways to Disappear, Katy Yocom
Click here to return to the series In October we head back to India, this time with author Katy Yocom, author of Three Ways to Disappear. Ecofiction is a type of literature that handles nature-oriented and human-impact plots while telling a great fictional story that imagines or reflects real environmental […]
Read More