Tag Archives: climate fiction

“Like neither a thing nor a picture of a thing”

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Reading The End of Everything for the Telegraph, 27 June 2026

What kind of end, what kind of everything, is this?

The iGhetti arrived by accident, pouring “like neither a thing nor a picture of a thing” out of New York, Dubai, the great banking cities of China. They’re not of this world, but they’re not unworldly, either. In their own reality-breaking way, they’re not so different from us: “All projects, the iGhetti believe, are inherently good. They are good because they are projects.”

The iGhetti have filled Earth’s oceans with amorphous artefacts of uncertain use that swell up and adapt to whatever environment they end up in. Tennent, an Oxford PPE drop-out turned beachcomber, fishes one out of the Hastings surf (maybe Hastings, maybe Hythe, maybe some point in between – since the iGhetti arrived and broke things, who cares for geography?) and within days it’s grown limbs and a face and the rudiments of language: “Hello, nice,” it says.

Tennent’s aunt Marnie wants nothing to do with the thing; neither does Tennent’s sometime lover Alice. He tries selling the thing to Hampson, “the beachcomber’s call of last resort”, who uses iGhetti artefacts as organic batteries, or maybe sentient transmitters, or maybe none of the above, in an effort to communicate with the “invaders”. But Hampson is a creep, and Tennent changes his mind. Alice catches a passenger ferry into the impenetrable sea fog that stands, in this broken world, for the future. Sooner than accompany her, Tennent and the thing wave her goodbye and then fetch up at a seaside gallery where they find Marnie sleeping “in a corner of the inevitable gift shop, under a pile of Mondrian-themed cycling jerseys”.

Things are mounting to a tragic crisis. Newcomers to Harrison’s work will have immense difficulty articulating how. It is the end of everything. It would take a novel to explain why.

Toxic praise has dogged the forty-odd year career of M John Harrison. He’s so weird, his fans sigh; he’s one of a kind. If you insist you can read The End of Everything this way – as a pretty ribbon, tying together much of what Harrison has made before. The iGhetti are the same existential bumblers we met in 1980’s A Storm of Wings. Alice and Marnie might have wondered out of 1992’s metaphysical puzzle-box The Course of the Heart. The Great Rift of Harrison’s sly space opera Light and its sequels is implicit here in the Strip – a stretch of post-apocalyptic High Weald coastline where, along with the teashops and antiques fairs, “there was a lot of poured cement and half-functioning neon, a lot of territoriality”.

But this would be to miss much that is new, or at any rate, whetted to a finer edge.

Now the iGhetti are here, people don’t quite know what to do with themselves. But – this is a point Harrison has been orbiting around for a while, and this time he nails it – they never did know. Reality is big and humans are small. Apprehending the world in its fullness would annihilate them, so they have always taken care to wear blinkers. Back before the iGhetti arrived there was something called “the economy”, and that made no sense either, and “life had been like a huge silent beautiful blossom opening to the economic light, with its roots deep in a mysterious, self-fulfilling growth medium and its leaves outstretched to welcome each new opportunity, untroubled and hothoused…”

Harrison understands the novel is merely a score: that it’s the reader who does all the work. The End of Everything is constructed like an overheard conversation – the reader can’t quite credit that they heard what they thought they heard, or that it means what they think it means.

It takes an extraordinary amount of engineering to carry off this effect. Harrison isn’t weirder than most other writers; he’s better. Writing at this level of intensity takes its toll. For the first time, and writing ostensibly about his protagonist, Harrison allows himself what amounts to a life statement: “What had begun as his desire to see and understand the end of the world,” he writes, “had decayed first into a kind of adventure sport, then a profession, and at the last, a burden.”

Most of this burden is being lifted from the reader’s shoulders: reading The End of Everything, you feel you’re not so much reading as dreaming. I’d call this a painterly effect, if calling a novel “painterly” wasn’t itself a kiss of sales death. But what the hell: The End of Everything is like a painting by Paul Nash – chalky, degreased, illumined – as the man himself says – by “a pure 1930s light, from an imagination stocked when people could use words like ‘spiritual’ and still mean something.”

A lousy container for thought

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A critical survey of climate fiction for The Bookseller, 18 October 2021

A genre to contain our imaginative responses to climate change was only ever going to be a house built of straw. Climate change is not like any other problem — the nuclear threat, say, or the hole in the ozone layer, or big tobacco, or big pharma. We are used to satirising, vilifying and sometimes even explaining and humanising our societal mistakes. But our species’ role in the earth’s average temperature rise isn’t, in any meaningful sense, either an accident or an oversight; nor is it a deliberate act of malevolence or of willful blindness. It’s a wicked problem, embracing generations living and dead and still to be born, implicating everyone on earth, and calling into question every stab we’ve ever made at progress.

Calling attention to the problem has been the easy bit. We had tools we could use. Science fiction, in particular, had over half a century’s experience exploring risks of all kinds, not all of them goofy or existential, when George Turner’s The Sea and Summer (1987) turned a generation of SF readers on to the firestorms to come.

The work we these days most easily classify as “climate fiction” has hardly got beyond that early, siren-sounding stage. That sounds like a problem, but I’m not sure it is one. Promoting a genre means giving it clear lines and simple definitions. Of course work labelled “cli-fi” remains wedded to an essentially dystopic view of the future: those are the rules we set for it. Nor, come to that, is there anything wrong with informing emerging generations of the problems they must face. Marcus Sedgwick and Paolo Bacigalupi and their peers have built worthwhile careers on this minatory effort. There’s no point complaining about how “cli-fi” aestheticises the disasters it depicts. Artists communicate through beauty, not disgust. (Go look at Goya, if you don’t believe me.)

And there has been progress. The genre’s brief has widened. The Swan Book by Australian Aboriginal author and land rights activist Alexis Wright (2013) highlights how the colonial abuse of peoples goes hand in hand with the land’s exhaustion. Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves (2017) would have us stop treating the world as a series of problems to be solved.

This approach, it is true, has less appeal for those of us who have more of our lives to look back on than to look forward to. For us, solutions to the End Times can’t come quickly enough.

Bruce Sterling’s Viridian Design Movement and Neal Stephenson’s Hieroglyph Project promised to amass fictional thought experiments to solve our difficult future. Though their calls for submissions of socially useful fiction were directed at younger writers from diverse backgrounds, they were, in essence, activities aimed at old western men in a hurry. These projects fell short of their promise, but not, I think, because they tried to be positive, and not because they came from an unfashionable corner of the culture. They failed *because fiction is the wrong tool for that kind of work*. Fiction is — let’s be frank here — a lousy container for thought.

One of the most successful climate-engaged books of the last couple of years, Richard Powers’s The Overstory, is, dramatically speaking, also one of the most underwhelming: little more than an animated Wikipedia trawl through contemporary abuses in the forestry sector. James Bradley contracts a milder version of the same disease in his recent novel Ghost Species (2021): a thinly fictionalised series of opinion pieces on the role of synthetic biology in addressing biome loss.

These books are symptoms of our moment, not shapers of it, and that’s because fiction undermines received opinion far more effectively than it establishes it. It’s a solvent, not a glue. Far more influential on the cli-fi scene are David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) and Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam trilogy — works that, significantly, leave us questioning the very idea that climate solutions are possible.

Writers! Let’s leave dealing with climate change to the grown-ups, and go back to our proper job: teasing out what it feels like to be in a climate crisis.

Yun Ko-eun’s 2020 satire The Disaster Tourist describes an economy geared to our appetite for disaster. Gathering Evidence by Martin MacInnes and The Rain Heron by Robbie Arnott (both 2020) spin twisted eco-fables thick with guilt and dripping with cognitive dissonance. Jeff Vandermeer dons the motley of a private eye to solve the murder of the Earth in Hummingbird Salamander (2021); and Laura Jean Mckay gives our doomed biome a voice in The Animals in That Country (2020).

These books and others are at last addressing the subjective experience of climate change. That’s vital psychological work, and socially useful with it: you can throw facts at our heads all day long, but people will deny and avoid that which they cannot feel.

Meanwhile, within science fiction and the high-concept thriller, and from out of the recent glut of “dystopian” fiction, a much keener, cleverer, more properly fictional approach is emerging to address the climate crisis.

It’s the creeping uncanny of the coming apocalypse that’s engaging the current wave of climate-engaged writers. Under the Blue by Oana Aristide and This Fragile Earth by Susannah Wise both exploit the fact that anything on the scale of a climate disaster is going to be slow. Civilisation will collapse, but the shelves won’t empty overnight, and the flood insurance won’t bankrupt you just yet. Wise goes even further, projecting beyond climate disaster towards a workable new world. All around us, the city’s 3D-printed buildings are spiralling into being, while a few hardy saplings in the derelict neighbourhood park are “evidence of the blight’s end”. Whether Wise’s heroine will ever be able to wrap her pre-apocalyptic head around this post-apocalyptic future is, however, uncertain.

In the Goldsmiths-winning The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again (2020), to take an even more powerful example, M John Harrison leads his readers around the archaeological leavings of Ironbridge picking his way between the foetuses of discarded genetic experiments spilling from the back of an aquarium shop. This is a world where current tools and technology can find no purchase in a reality that’s already wedded to the future.

This new crop of climate fiction won’t, after all, help us save tomorrow — but it will, and for the first time, help us picture it. For as long as they were wedded to what might happen in the future, writers of climate fiction could only amount to a bunch of Cassandras, trumpeting their own importance. Now they are feeding on much richer meat. Cli-fi has stuck its teeth into the present.