YA Guy Reviews... Climate Change Books!

Here's a little known fact: YA Guy has a passion for the environment.

Well, maybe that's not such a big secret. Some of my blog posts are environment-related; my novels are set in a desert world radically altered by environmental degradation; and I'm sure if you checked my Twitter feed or Facebook page you'd find environmental stuff there too.

But did you know I've been an environmental activist for almost ten years? And that the focus of my activism has been the fight against global warming?

It's true. Ever since I saw the film An Inconvenient Truth in 2006, I've been involved in raising popular and political consciousness about the threat posed by a changing climate. I've organized and participated in marches and rallies, met with politicians, developed a regional citizens climate change network, hosted teach-ins on climate change, taught the subject in my college classes, sat on a local college board dedicated to reducing campus emissions, and done whatever else I could to highlight the issue of climate change and advocate for personal and political action to combat it. I sometimes feel I haven't done enough, but I've sure tried.

Nor do I see this side of me as inconsistent with being YA Guy. I believe (and the science backs me up) that climate change is the greatest challenge future generations will face. While my existing novels are not in any way political polemics (and none of my works-in-progress directly addresses climate change at all), I believe YA literature has a responsibility to dramatize this issue.

Lots of great YA books do just that: Paolo Bacigalupi's Ship Breaker and The Drowned Cities, Mindy McGinnis's Not a Drop to Drink and In a Handful of Dust, Sherri L. Smith's Orleans, Emmi Itaranta's Memory of Water, Saci Lloyd's The Carbon Diaries, and many more recent YA books use climate change as either a backdrop or central feature of their fictions.

A new scholarly book by Adam Trexler, Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change (2015), barely touches on YA (which is one of its weaknesses), but it's an interesting analysis of the emergence of climate-change fiction (which some, following the coinage of Dan Bloom, call "cli-fi," but which Trexler calls "anthropocene fiction"). Trexler asks two main questions: how can fiction help us to conceptualize and address the problems we're facing and will continue to face in a climate-changed world? And how will fiction itself be changed by the changing climate and all its ramifications? Though I take issue with Trexler's claim that there is "entirely too much science fiction" (6) among climate-change novels--as if science fiction is a poor substitute for realistic fiction rather than the thought-provoking genre it has always been--this review and analysis of anthropocene fiction is a welcome addition to the literature of (or about) climate change.

The same is true of journalist Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (2014). Klein argues that the truly inconvenient truth about climate change--something Al Gore's film refuses to admit--is that we can't meaningfully address the changing climate without radically restructuring the economic, political, and cultural underpinnings of the society that has caused the problem. In other words, so long as we remain addicted to capitalism's mantra of limitless growth, we'll never be able to resist the fossil-fuel mania that is driving anthropogenic climate change. Klein argues that local economies, democratically organized, are a necessary alternative to our current global economy, an economy ruled by corporations whose sole mandate is greater profit even at the expense of people and planet. I tend to agree with Klein; the cheery idea that we can solve the problem utilizing the same models that produced the problem strikes me as fulfilling the classic definition of insanity. Whether we as a species can actually take the radical steps Klein advocates is, of course, another matter.

As a writer, an environmentalist, and a father, YA Guy certainly hopes we can.

YA Guy Reviews... SHIP BREAKER by Paolo Bacigalupi

YA Guy's taking a break from online activities for 10 days starting tomorrow. (True confession: it's one of the presents I promised my wife for our 20-year anniversary! Less time online = more time together!) I'll be back in August to regale you with more reviews, interviews, giveaways, guest posts, and commentaries--but not wanting to leave you hanging, I'm posting a review of Paolo Bacigalupi's YA science fiction novel SHIP BREAKER.

Enjoy, and I'll see you in a few days!

YA Guy had heard great things about science-fiction writer Paolo Bacigalupi’s debut YA novel, Ship Breaker.

Word on the street was that his novel is lyrical, intelligent, thrilling, inventive, and powerful. A must-read. One of the finest literary YAs around.

So I read it. And guess what?

All the hype is true.

Ship Breaker tells the story of Nailer, a teenage boy in a post-global-warming world who works along the Gulf Coast disassembling oil tankers from the fossil-fuel era. It’s dangerous work, where kids like the unlucky Jackson Boy get lost forever in the tankers’ guts and failure to meet the daily quota can result in expulsion from the crew and, like the unfortunate Sloth, a life without work or hope. For Nailer, what makes his life even worse is his father, an abusive drunk and drug addict who holds his son in a grip of fear. The only thing that keeps Nailer going is his dream of salvaging something truly valuable so he can follow in the footsteps of the man known as Lucky Strike, who bought his way off the ship-breaking crews when he discovered a hidden cache of oil. With a score that big, Nailer thinks, he’ll be able to leave his dad and sail away on one of the sleek clipper ships that have replaced the cumbersome tankers in this new era.

And then, one day, Nailer finds the wreck of a clipper ship, with a survivor inside: the daughter of one of the biggest shipping barons in the world. Should Nailer join forces with his dad, who plans to barter her life for gold, or help her in her fight for freedom?

Ship Breaker kept me riveted for a number of reasons. To begin with, its teen protagonist, Nailer, captured my imagination: a boy whom life has given every reason to be brutal, yet who struggles to remain decent and true. Then, too, I was drawn by the book’s examination of power and privilege, its exposure of the extremes of wealth and poverty that mar our own world. In such a world, Nailer and the other ship-breakers rely on nothing more than luck to see them through, as the following beautifully written passage illustrates:

Life was like that. There were Lucky Strikes and there were Sloths; there were Jackson Boys and there were lucky bastards like him. Different sides of the same coin. You tossed your luck in the air and it rattled down on the gambling boards and you either lived or died.

Nailer’s discovery that there’s more to life than luck--that there are things like loyalty and family, whether biological or not--gives Ship Breaker a satisfyingly human quality to complement its fantastically well-rendered future world.

I’ve been warned that the companion volume to Ship Breaker, titled The Drowned Cities, is a tough read, a book that delves in graphic detail into the horrors of war and human cruelty. I don’t doubt this; Bacigalupi doesn’t shy from ugly truths. But I’m looking forward to reading it, if only because it fleshes out one of the most intriguing characters in Ship Breaker: the hybrid warrior Tool, a being created to be an utterly faithful servant who nonetheless develops a will and a desire of his own. The question of Tool’s humanity is hinted at in Ship Breaker; I expect it to be explored more fully in The Drowned Cities.

And I expect that, in the process, the question of our own humanity will be explored as well.