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 Presents... YA! for Nature with Sherri L. Smith, author of ORLEANS!

One of YA Guy's favorite YA science fiction novels of the past, well, forever is Sherri L. Smith's ORLEANS. (Here's my review, in case you missed it.) Today, I had the good fortune to interview Sherri for my occasional series, YA! for Nature. Here's what Sherri and I talked about:

YA Guy: Welcome to the blog, Sherri!

Sherri L. Smith: Hi YA Guy. Thanks for having me!

My pleasure. Please tell us about your book ORLEANS.

SLS: ORLEANS is set in a post-disaster New Orleans where a series of manmade and natural catastrophes have given rise to Delta Fever, a disease so deadly that the U.S. Government builds a quarantine wall from Florida to Texas and disavows that part of the country. Fifty years later, the survivors in the former city of New Orleans have gone tribal based on blood type—the last rules laid down by the CDC to stem the disease. Against this backdrop, the heroine Fen is tasked with saving the life of her tribal leader’s newborn baby after their tribe is destroyed. On the other side of the quarantine Wall, a young scientist named Daniel follows the smuggler paths into Orleans in his search for a cure to Delta Fever. Their paths cross and well, I guess you have to read the book to find out what happens next.

YAG: I know from your dedication and acknowledgments that you have a very personal connection to New Orleans and to the events that occurred when Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005. Can you tell us more about that connection and how it shaped your novel?

SLS: My mother was born and raised in New Orleans. She moved up north and met my father, but in later years, she returned to the city to take care of my grandparents until they passed. She was still living in the city when Katrina hit. Faced with the option of sitting in a car in traffic during the storm or weathering it in the 100-year-old house she’d grown up in, she opted to stay. Her house was damaged, but she would have been fine if the levees hadn’t broken and the city hadn’t shut down. There she was, a diabetic running out of insulin and drinking water in a city that had been quarantined against help. The Red Cross was not allowed in to offer aid under some misguided belief that people would be forced to leave. My mom tried to drive out of the city after the storm, but her truck was caught in flood waters and she had to be rescued by someone in a passing swamp boat. All told, it took my family a week of frantic phone calls and crazy plans to drive to the rescue (if only the few open roads were not patrolled by gun-toting law enforcement). At last, the Coast Guard, of all organizations, came to the rescue and got her out of the city and onto an airplane out of Louisiana.

Needless to say, it was a harrowing time.

In the aftermath of the disaster, Fen spoke to me, and Orleans was born. This book is my response to the tragedy of Katrina all along the southern coast. To the conversations about racism and rescue that took place as we watched the city drown. To the stories of gang members turning into protectors and law enforcement going rogue. I tried to remove race as an issue in Orleans and make it about blood type—something that you cannot see. Above all, I want people to remember New Orleans and Mississippi and all of the places forever changed by a single storm.

YAG: Of the two narrators in ORLEANS—a third-person narrator affiliated with the character Daniel, and a first-person narrator representing the perspective of the character Fen—I was most drawn to Fen’s voice and vision. Where did the character of Fen come from? Why did you decide to speak in her distinctive voice?

SLS: As I said above, Fen literally spoke to me. I was driving home from work one day in the weeks after my mom had been safely brought to California, and I heard a voice say “O-Neg Davis, he beautiful.” I had no idea what that was about, but I called my voicemail and left it in a message. And that turned into the powwow scene with Fen’s O Positive tribe and the O-Negs led by handsome Davis with his agate green eyes. Her voice was so natural to the story that I kept it. New Orleans is such a stew of cultures, it made sense that the natural language would be a patois of some sort. So there is “speaking tribe,” which is the voice Fen thinks in, and then there is “proper English,” which is used by the educated, the leaders and scientists.

YAG: Late in the novel, one of the characters—a scientist who lives the life of a hermit—states: “Nature knows what to do with a poison. She dilutes it.” There are so many ways to read these lines, but given your novel’s representation of human society, one of the things they suggest is that human beings are the “poison” that Nature needs to “dilute.” What’s your feeling about this? How do you read these lines?

SLS: That’s an interesting way of looking at it. I certainly do think that humans, along with all other life forms, are as much a boon as a burden to the planet, and Nature has its ways of culling the herd—such as disease, and our own solution, war. It’s like homeopathic medicine—there is the tipping point at which the poison is too weak to kill, but can help you build an immunity. In the case of the character in the book, he is talking about Nature’s ability to recover even after a major disaster—the oil spill from the Deep Water Horizon will have repercussions for decades, but the ocean will survive. One of the reasons it was dangerous to eat seafood in the aftermath of the oil spill was because the shellfish and bottom feeders sift through the water and act as filters. It might make them inedible, and lead to illness in both the shellfish and the creatures that eat them, but eventually the water will be filtered clean and new shellfish will be born and life will continue. That’s what is happening in the Orleans of the book, but it’s hard to take that long view when your life could end the next day.

YAG: Some readers and reviewers have termed ORLEANS a cli-fi novel. What do you think about this emerging genre of fiction?

SLS: Climate has always been a topic in speculative fiction, so I don’t know that the genre is new so much as the classification is becoming more popular now. I think it’s great if it gets people to look at books they might have missed. That said, the climate is the backdrop for ORLEANS, rather than the point of the story. So, if you are looking for eco-lit, maybe you’ll find this title, which is great—and then the characters and the drama will carry you to the final page.

YAG: Last question. You and I are fiction writers, not politicians or pundits. What’s the role, if any, of fiction in calling attention to environmental issues and problems?

SLS: Hmm. I think the job of writers, particularly speculative fiction writers, is to ask interesting questions. Like Mary Shelley—is it okay for man to create artificial life like Frankenstein did? What are the responsibilities of such actions? For Orleans—are we willing to abandon part or our nation to its own devices (which is very much what it felt like during Katrina)? If so, what are the consequences? What happens next? It’s true that writers are not politicians or pundits, but we are citizens of the world, and students of human nature. There is a reason writers become political prisoners in some societies. We ask questions. If we’re lucky, someone reads the book, thinks about it, and answers start to follow.

YAG: Thanks for being on the blog, Sherri! Readers, if you want to learn more about Sherri Smith and her writing, here’s where to go:

www.sherrilsmith.com

www.middlehundred.blogspot.com

Sherri on Facebook

Twitter: @sherril_l_smith

YA Guy Writes... Cli-Fi!

Back in 1973, when YA Guy was … well, considerably younger, I read a book titled Dar Tellum: Stranger From a Distant Planet, by James R. Berry. It tells the story of a boy who communicates telepathically with an alien (Dar Tellum), and it’s got lots of appealing sci-fi elements for younger readers. From the perspective of today, however, what’s most striking about it is the central conflict:

“It seems that the planet Earth was right in the middle of a big crisis. Dozens of cities were in danger of becoming flooded. Already one city in some eastern country was almost covered with water. And the reason for this flooding was that the oceans were getting higher.

From what I understood, and I’m sure there are gaps here and there, the smoke from cars and factories goes into the air. A part of this smoke called carbon dioxide gets into the atmosphere of Earth. It lets the sun’s heat in, but it won’t let much heat out. This carbon dioxide makes a kind of one-way lid on Earth. Heat in, but not much out.

And this extra heat was warming up the north and south poles. So the ice was melting and the oceans were getting higher.”

Yes, folks, there it is, in a children’s book from the early seventies: global warming.

Dar Tellum, in other words, is an early example of what’s come to be known as “cli-fi”: fiction having to do with climate change. Some (though not all) cli-fi is also sci-fi, and (as a science fiction writer myself) that’s the kind I prefer.

A gentleman by the name of Danny Bloom (@polarcityman on Twitter) introduced me to the genre of cli-fi. I hadn’t known it was a genre beforehand.

Which is odd, since my own debut novel is cli-fi.

Survival Colony 9 is set in a future where war and environmental catastrophe have turned the world into a desert. Though I didn’t set out to write a book about climate change--and though the book is certainly no polemic--it’s impossible for me to imagine the story without that desert setting, which possesses not only visual but thematic significance. In fact, the setting was the first thing that came to mind when I started the story way back when, and everything else grew from it.

There are lots of great YA sci-fi cli-fi novels out there. Here’s a sampling of new and forthcoming titles (listed alphabetically):

Not a Drop to Drink by Mindy McGinnis (@MindyMcGinnis)

Orleans by Sherri L. Smith (@Sherri_L_Smith)

Rootless by Chris Howard (@chrisH0WARD)

SeaBEAN by Sarah Holding (@SeaHolding)

Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi (@paolobacigalupi)

Some Fine Day by Kat Ross (@katrossauthor)

Starvation Ridge by Risa Stephanie Bear (@risa_s_bear)

Wasteland by Susan Kim and Laurence Klavan (@KimKlavan)

It's great to know there are so many others exploring climate change in their writing. It's great to be part of a movement.

And my hat's off to writers like James R. Berry, who planted the seed so many years ago.