{"id":1566,"date":"2026-07-24T18:12:56","date_gmt":"2026-07-24T18:12:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1566"},"modified":"2026-07-24T18:12:56","modified_gmt":"2026-07-24T18:12:56","slug":"what-climate-fiction-should-accomplish","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1566","title":{"rendered":"What Climate Fiction Should Accomplish"},"content":{"rendered":"<section>\n<div>\n<p><small><em>This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors\u2019 weekly guide to the best in books. <\/em><i>Sign up for it here.<\/i><\/small><\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1564\">Is AI the End of Cheap Tech?<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>Last week, I woke up in Washington, D.C., to a simmering, suffocating haze. The thermometer reached triple digits, and so did the air-quality index, which my phone told me meant \u201cvery unhealthy.\u201d If I lived somewhere else\u2014in Delhi, maybe, or Kinshasa, or Los Angeles\u2014where high temperatures and murky skies were more common, I might have been less surprised. But climate change means that such conditions are no longer confined to specific regions of the globe, and people everywhere are beginning to contend with once-rare events becoming almost routine. \u201cTo be unfamiliar with these outcomes is to be the outlier, not the norm,\u201d Robert Rubsam wrote about climate change and natural disasters this week in <em>The Atlantic<\/em>. So why is it so hard to point to literary fiction that successfully conveys the uncanny sensation of waking up in a different world?<\/p>\n<div>\n<p>First, here are four new stories from <em>The Atlantic<\/em>\u2019s Books section:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<ul>\n<li>Why so much Millennial fiction is boring<\/li>\n<li>A novel about the benefits\u2014and costs\u2014of being a rebel<\/li>\n<li>J. D. Vance\u2019s new book wasn\u2019t meant to be read<\/li>\n<li>\u201cOde to Ashy Knees,\u201d a poem by Lana Reeves<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<p>The writer Amitav Ghosh, in his 2016 book, <em>The Great Derangement<\/em>, argued that this is because the literary novel was built for a relatively stable planet. Now that the Earth has warmed significantly, he suggests we need new kinds of storytelling that can capture how it feels to live in an unpredictable world. His new novel, <em>Ghost-Eye<\/em>, attempts to do that. Unfortunately, Rubsam argues, it fails at its task. But when I read through the comments on his article, I saw readers arguing that plenty of writing <em>does <\/em>address global overheating, and expressing the opinion that the genre known as \u201cclimate fiction\u201d wasn\u2019t getting its due.<\/p>\n<p>They\u2019re right\u2014lots of genre fiction deals with apocalyptic climate disruptions. Climate anxiety is also trickling into literary fiction, as Rubsam points out. He disagrees with Ghosh\u2019s contention that authors are unable to adapt to extraordinary times. But he also encourages a broader manner of thinking, pointing to earlier fiction that successfully shows what it\u2019s like to live through disruption: Juan Rulfo\u2019s haunted response to 1950s Mexico, <em>Pedro P\u00e1ramo<\/em>; Jos\u00e9 Donoso\u2019s magical-realist novel of Chilean upheaval, <em>The Obscene Bird of Night<\/em>. By invoking novels from other eras, Rubsam moves beyond the idea of simply depicting specific symptoms of planetary warming, like a receding glacier or a dried-up aquifer. He\u2019s writing about books that evoke the feeling that the world has shifted beneath your feet.<\/p>\n<p>This debate over how well fiction adapts to \u201cforces so great and impersonal that they seem to actively confound attempts at storytelling,\u201d as Rubsam put it, reminded me of another Books article published in <em>The Atlantic <\/em>this week, by Hillary Kelly. Kelly also believes that a new novel\u2014in this case Jem Calder\u2019s <em>I Want You to Be Happy<\/em>\u2014fails to make the strangeness of contemporary life compelling. But what most frustrates her is that Calder\u2019s portrayal of Millennial ennui and directionlessness takes those qualities at face value and, in doing so, replicates them. \u201cI want to understand alienation; I don\u2019t want to feel alienated\u2014and nothing more\u2014by reading,\u201d Kelly writes. Similarly, I don\u2019t need fiction to describe how dangerous a flash flood is, or what it\u2019s like for a tornado to rip through your town. I\u2019ve experienced those things myself, and they\u2019re certain to recur in my lifespan. I want my fiction to be bolder: to use language and imagination that bring me to a new kind of comprehension, not just a re-creation of what I already know.<\/p>\n<p><strong>The Crisis That Novelists Can\u2019t Handle<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><i>By Robert Rubsam<\/i><\/p>\n<p>Amitav Ghosh believes that climate change requires rethinking the novel. His new work of fiction fails that standard.<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1562\">Tesla Is Failing Upward<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Read the full article.<\/p>\n<h4><b>What to Read<\/b><\/h4>\n<p><strong><em>U and I<\/em><\/strong><strong>, by Nicholson Baker<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I can now say that I\u2019ve been reading Baker for more than 20 years, or more than half my life. But I didn\u2019t know that would happen when I found <em>U and I<\/em> in a college friend\u2019s car, borrowed it, and never returned it. The subject, not the author, appealed to me then\u2014I loved John Updike. And so did Baker, though <em>love<\/em> is probably not the right word. This book-length essay is not quite, or not merely, an appreciation of Updike; it\u2019s a hilarious confessional \u201ctrue story\u201d of Baker\u2019s anxieties, ambitions, competitive jealousy, and feelings of inadequacy in the face of Updike\u2019s abundant body of work. It\u2019s rich too, with wonderful observations on reading and writing in general, as in a passage considering how much more affecting a memoir becomes once the author is deceased: \u201cThe living are \u2018just\u2019 writing about their own lives; the dead are writing about their irretrievable <em>lives<\/em>, wow wow wow.\u201d\u00a0 \u2014 Elisa Gabbert<\/p>\n<p>From our list: Five books for people who really love books<\/p>\n<h4><b>Out Next Week<\/b><\/h4>\n<p><em>\ud83d\udcda <\/em><em>I Made You Up Inside My Head<\/em>, by Marta P\u00e9rez-Carbonell<\/p>\n<div>\n<p><em>\ud83d\udcda <\/em><em>Melancholy I &amp; II<\/em><em>,<\/em> by Jon Fosse<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<p><em>\ud83d\udcda <\/em><em>The Winds of Maracaibo<\/em>, by Mar\u00eda Elena Mor\u00e1n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<h4><strong>Your Weekend Read<\/strong><\/h4>\n<p><strong>Too Scared for Sex<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><i>By Faith Hill<\/i><\/p>\n<p>Perhaps the \u201csex recession,\u201d then, is merely a symptom of something bigger: an eroticism shortage, resulting from a great discomfort with uncertainty. If so, the stakes would be much higher than they were in 2006. It would mean that people aren\u2019t just falling out of lust with their partner but struggling to connect, to feel deeply, and to be present for their own life. \u201cToday, the question is not so much <em>How do you sustain desire in the long haul<\/em>,\u201d Perel told me, \u201cbut <em>How do we ignite it in the first place?<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Read the full article.<\/p>\n<div>\n<p><small><em>When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting <\/em>The Atlantic<em>.<\/em><\/small><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<p><small><i>Sign up for The Wonder Reader,<\/i><i> a Saturday newsletter in which our editors recommend stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight.<\/i><\/small><\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1560\">The Peptide Gold Rush Is Coming<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<p><small><i>Explore <\/i><i>all of our newsletters.<\/i><\/small><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Can a novel capture the shock of planetary instability?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1565,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1566","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books-briefing"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.7 - 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