Posted by Seamus Sullivan

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In her introduction to the first volume of the Tor Essentials 2021 edition of The Book of the New Sun (1980-87), Ada Palmer compares Gene Wolfe’s magnum opus to an incomplete jigsaw puzzle, writing, “Our 100 puzzle pieces let us glimpse an image so vast it would take 100,000” (p. x). In essence, she’s arguing that there are worlds, histories, systems so vast and complex that the only way human understanding can begin to encapsulate them is through fragmentary, localized detail. Climate Imagination: Dispatches from Hopeful Futures, an ambitious anthology edited by Joey Eschrich and Ed Finn, makes a compelling case for understanding and addressing anthropogenic climate change through this exact approach.

You likely have some puzzle pieces of your own, simply from being alive on Earth. I have mine. The Statue of Liberty and the Hudson disappearing behind an orange shroud of wildfire smoke. Pushing my kids on the swings on a hellishly hot November day, the morning after the 2024 presidential election. Bringing a book or two for the slow-moving EV recharge queue. Doom jockeying with elation as my eldest son learns to love animals and ecosystems. What are yours?

Climate Imagination is its own eclectic assortment of puzzle pieces, combining fiction and essays and focusing on the psychological and logistical work of envisioning and building the hopeful futures of the book’s subtitle. Each of the collection’s four sections is bookended by a different SFF writer, beginning with a long novelette and ending with a short story, with the essays and panel discussions of various contributors positioned in between. João Queiroz provides illustrations of green, sunlit future landscapes throughout, though his colorful tableaux lose some pizzazz in black and white and are worth seeing online in their original vibrancy. (While this review focuses on the print collection, an open-access online version, The Climate Action Almanac, is also available for browsing and commentary, and contains additional talks and interviews.)

The book opens with Vandana Singh’s novelette, “Three-World Cantata,” which sets the tone for the collection. Singh makes sense as the headliner here. She has written about teaching the climate crisis, and her collection Ambiguity Machines (2018) deftly juggles interconnected narratives and high-stakes social criticism. (If you would like to traumatize yourself into becoming a vegetarian, “Are You Sannata3159?” from Ambiguity Machines just might do the trick.) Singh brings all those strengths to “Cantata,” which is such a good and intricate story that it’s worth examining here at length.

Singh’s sort-of protagonist is Manny, the CEO of Ultracorp, who has been enticed into a climate future simulator by Chingari, a storyteller/engineer/activist who often addresses us directly. Singh gains some credibility right away by acknowledging that the same hubris that is causing the climate crisis is also prompting the most culpable parties (i.e., the rich and powerful) to believe they’re the best qualified to impose top-down solutions. As Chingari puts it, “They want to feel like heroes: the elite who will save the Earth. Why not make use of that phenomenal obliviousness to their own role in the hell they’ve made?” (p. 17). And so, Chingari uses Manny’s expectations of ego-stroking and greenwashing to lure him into a simulated journey through the titular three worlds (World Zero is our own reality, while Worlds One and Two represent possible futures), all of which is meant to inspire a Scrooge-like change of heart, or at least demoralize the CEO enough to sabotage Ultracorp’s relentless quest for market share.

Each of our possible futures is associated with a mode of thought—an “orienting metaphor” in the story’s lingo. The orienting metaphor for World One is a clock: cold, mechanized, inflexible, a device associated with factory shifts, quantification, and control; the kind of thing that evokes a John W. Campbell, “Cold Equations”-style veneer of scientific rationality. In World One, ubiquitous guns and sensors cordon off some parts of the world as worth saving and write off other parts of the world as regrettable but unavoidable sacrifices.

Singh is as sick of this orienting metaphor as we are, and the story spends much more time in World Two, whose orienting metaphor is a tapestry—colorful, warm, flexible, and collaborative. “No story by itself can do this,” Chingari says, referring to the work of mapping out crucial social and technological change. “You need a network of stories, stories that talk to each other, like patterns on a weave” (p. 14).

And how the stories of Singh’s three worlds talk to each other! We get a nested fable about the false promise of certain carbon disposal methods and a rapturous monologue about the engineering properties of mud. We get words like “symbiome” (a political unit made up of all the living things in a local ecosystem) and “ecocide” (a legally recognized crime for which CEOs must work off their debt by planting mangroves). We get surprise resurrections and trash-picking robots. We get a striking acknowledgement that there are limits to what even the most carefully crafted story can accomplish.

Nilu, a young Dalit woman who belongs to a symbiome in one of the Indian subcontinent’s threatened forests in World Two, is about to testify on behalf of the local elephants, hoping to forestall the construction of a road through their habitat. Recognizing the construction company’s representative as the man who once bulldozed her old village and attacked her, Nilu falters:

She had lost her voice. Her carefully prepared speech in Hindi, a poetic interweaving of song and science, story and data, had vanished into thin air. It was as though the language that contained words like ‘Dalit’ and ‘woman’ had become foreign to her. Then she remembered, slowly, the half-learned words of another tongue. (p. 26)

Blowing into a hollowed-out gourd designed to mimic an elephant’s trumpet, Nilu summons Jhumroo, the local elephant matriarch, who enters the clearing, touches the company man’s chest with her trunk, and causes him to collapse from a heart attack. Human speech can only do so much, but it’s one tool among many.

And it can give us such heartening images and ideas when we need them most. Consider the advice given to Manny by the personified memory of his grandmother: “Time is thick,” she admonishes him, reminding him of afternoons in his youth when they worked together in the kitchen.

It came back to him vividly. The hot, smoky kitchen. His grandmother knitting while the rice boiled and the daal bubbled. She would lean over to smell the aroma—cumin and ginger, garlic and tomatoes—and stir, her head wreathed in clouds of condensing steam. He would write in his notebook, and then, when he needed to think about the next problem, he would get up and slice the cucumber for the raita, eating slices on the sly. She always caught him, whacked his hand, and they would giggle. They would recite the multiplication table together. And his grandmother would say, time is thick! In a professional lifetime of scheduling watertight compartments of time one after the other, he had come to think of time as necessarily sequential, an infinitesimally thin line, stretching out into the horizon. But now he felt at the edge of a revelation. If you looked closely at the time axis by yourself, it remained a long, thin line stretching from past through present and into the future—nothing changed. But look at it, engage with it along with other people, other beings, and you would see it thicken, acquire structure. (p. 34)

Because of the limitations of space, the moral urgency of the issue at hand, and the need to cut through the noise of bad-faith ecofascist nonsense, Singh is more than happy to write scenes that are as marvelously unsubtle as, well, an elephant stomping into a clearing. But she also knows exactly how and when to slow her story down, to immerse us and Manny in the smells and tastes and sounds of his grandmother’s kitchen, until time really does seem to thicken, and until the entire sensory magic trick of the kitchen can be compressed and evoked in one simple, memorable phrase.

Many of the ideas introduced so effectively in “Three-World Cantata” echo in the fiction and nonfiction that follow. I noticed that binaries were a frequent theme, and while binaries can be reductive, they can also be an effective way to highlight choices, and to challenge an unsustainable status quo that we’ve been told is inevitable. The coldly utilitarian, top-down ideas of World One are a persistent menace, particularly in “City of Choice,” the book’s second major novelette.

In this story, written by Beijing-based city planner Gu Shi and translated by Ken Liu, cities of the near future adapt to extreme weather in a variety of ways. We see self-sufficient apartment blocks (“integrated compounds”) which wait out floods with their own day cares, vegetable gardens, power plants, and waste treatment. We see modular oceangoing cities of interlocking, floating platforms. In flood-prone Ze City, we see cars with emergency flotation devices and, most importantly, a special navigation system for flood evacuations. Named “Da Yu” or “Great Yu” after the legendary founder of the Xian Dynasty, this navigation system propels the story’s plot. Tushan Jiao, an urban planner who helped with Da Yu’s design, rescues and ultimately adopts two girls who are trapped in a flooding building at the story’s outset. Later, she realizes that Da Yu left the rest of the girls’ family to die, as the system calculated they had lower odds of survival. It’s a horrifying revelation, and sets “City of Choice” apart as the most pessimistic story of the bunch. It’s a testament to the nihilism of some prevailing narratives that Gu Shi’s acknowledgement of human sacrifice as a choice (and not a grim necessity) feels like a last, desperate attempt to maintain some relationship with morality. Humans do have a choice, even if there’s no guarantee we’ll make the right one.

Worlds One and Two are, then, a recurring binary; the Global North and South are another. Writers from both North and South are represented, as are writers who can lay claim to both regions. This includes Singh (who has lived in Delhi and Boston) and Chinelo Onwualu, a Nigerian writer-editor who lives in Toronto. In her essay, “The Case for Reckless Climate Optimism,” Onwualu mounts a welcome challenge to the numbing specter of dystopia. “My people have gone through what the white imagination would consider the apocalypse,” she writes. “[…] As someone whose personal and collective history has seen entrenched systems of power crumble overnight, I know that the barriers to making fundamental changes in how we live and work are not as intractable as they seem” (p. 38). In a similar vein, Jacqueline Nyathi has written and spoken against apocalyptic thinking here at Strange Horizons, and her arguments for an alternative perspective—from outside the Western hegemony that has done so much to get us into this mess—are as compelling as they are invigorating.

An alternative perspective is exactly what the collection’s third major novelette provides, in both its content and its authorship. Writer-editor Libia Brenda collaborated with a group of writers, scientists, and visual artists (Andrea Chapela, Gabriela Damián Miravete, Martha Riva Palacio, Iliana Vargas, and Alejandra Espino del Castillo) to create the nontraditional family saga “Cosmic Fire,” in which five generations of narrators flee, regroup, and ultimately return to a changed landscape after the volcanic eruption of Iztaccíhuatl. With its motif of social, geographic, linguistic, and bodily transformation, “Cosmic Fire” contains many of the anthology’s most affecting images—including a young woman who bakes the soil of her grandmother’s garden, and the ashes of her ancestors, into a ceramic eye, so that they’ll remain a part of her as she travels. There’s a dreamlike section in which climate refugees merge with plants and sea creatures—not quite body horror, but body SF—and a remarkable passage in which a character’s burn scars become a place where the body and the land merge: “[…] how fascinated I was by the skin of her forearm and the way it looked like a three-dimensional map, full of different-colored furrows and bulges. She said it was a map etched by fire, a treasure map of memory” (p. 81).

Fire doesn’t stop at people and land. It also changes social relationships and language. In Emma Törzs’s vivid translation, the term “my-firefamily” emerges to describe family bonds that aren’t defined by bloodlines but by choices, shared experiences, even mutual interests in scientific research (two characters bond over the real Martian meteorite ALH 84001). While I sometimes struggled to picture the details of each successive generation’s daily lives, due to the density of the narrative and the array of authors, the strength of the images above still made this a cohesive and exciting piece of work. Speaking of images, some of collaborator Alejandra Espino del Castillo’s artwork is reproduced in black and white in the print version, but the full-color, multimedia art (including real ceramics!) can be found online and is well worth a click.

Another element from “Three-World Cantata” that echoes throughout the anthology is that story’s closing acknowledgment that “World One and World Two are right here, in World Zero” (p. 36). By juxtaposing fact and fiction, sometimes in neighboring entries and sometimes within the same work, Climate Imagination is as good a dramatization as I’ve seen of the intricate, unpredictable systems—social, economic, and meteorological—that are battering our planet here and now.

The book’s final novelette, by poet Hannah Onoguwe, uses this juxtaposition to great effect in describing the ramifications of fossil fuel extraction in the Niger river delta. In “Death is Not an Ornament,” Onoguwe presents a future history of the BRACED Republic, a newly independent region in what is now oil-rich southern Nigeria. In speculating about how the region might transition away from the oil industry—and the attendant baggage of corruption and political violence—Onoguwe weaves together a twisty thriller, real-life history including the Presidential Amnesty Programme and the Ogoni Nine, and a surprising pivot into the fantastical.

The anthology’s nonfiction essays provide their own glimpses of Worlds One and Two. There are interesting pieces on everything from grasshoppers to landslides to the history of human ideas about how to measure and write about climate. As an unrepentant urbanite, I found the essays on cities particularly interesting. In “The Unwalkable City,” Yudhanjaya Wijeratne describes Sri Lanka’s capital of Colombo, the problems of urban design that make the city “a baking patch of asphalt and concrete” (p. 115), and his own attempt to build an inexpensive, easy-to-cool earthbag house. He also discusses the cost and cruelty of centralized and overambitious urban development plans like the Colombo Megacity Project. “The chaotic interactions of a city are the bane of a central planner,” he writes, “[…] but those chaotic interactions are what make cities interesting, and bring a welcome measure of serendipity to our lives” (p. 123).

Benjamin Ong’s “The Village Within” looks at one example of such serendipity—the partial rewilding and rogue gardening that transformed Kuala Lumpur’s belukar (leftover pockets of undeveloped urban scrub) during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Pippa Goldschmidt’s “A Walk in Berlin” examines the wreckage of World War II and the Cold War, particularly the Green Belt that became a refuge for endangered birds in the shadow of the Berlin Wall. This is urban serendipity again, couched as a reminder that being shut out of government decisions and threatened by grand-scale catastrophe doesn’t take away one’s agency entirely: “Each individual act of shifting a pile of rubble, sharing food, growing a plant, paying attention to a bird, has its consequences” (p. 203).

In this vein, a dialogue between mathematician Nigel Topping, lawyer Farhana Yamin, and editor Ed Finn characterizes local efforts and the work of city and state governments, activist groups, and NGOs (what Topping describes as a “fractal approach”) as the best way forward, particularly when climate summits and presidents are not getting the job done. As Yamin puts it, “Implementing climate action in your High Street or village is easier than trying to imagine what the entire world will look like” (p. 228). For instance, urban low-emission zones implemented by various mayoral teams can help create an electric vehicle tipping point that may push the internal combustion engine into obsolescence decades earlier than expected. Another quotation from Topping stayed with me: “Climate action requires people to imagine something different before they do something different. And I think this overemphasis on science and the global geopolitics can block out imagination and uncertainty, and we need to be able to navigate a much messier way forward than any simple narrative can do justice to” (p. 229).

Imagination and uncertainty are two commodities that Climate Imagination delivers in abundance. If the volume feels, in the end, incomplete, 100 puzzle pieces out of 100,000, that’s a testament to how well it represents the scale of our current plight, and how clearly its contributors recognize a book’s limitations.

What changes are you going to be a part of, in your daily life and in your neighborhood? Will you take up birding and ask your city council to bird-proof your skyscrapers? Fly less? Will you apply to plant trees on your property, or will you lobby your state government about those execrable data centers? These questions have become unavoidable, but thanks to the work represented in Climate Imagination, they now inspire more excitement and curiosity in me than dread. There are worse places to start from. Time is thick.

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