Eco-Fiction’s Broad Embrace
Marjorie Kellogg (author of Glimmer) and Mary Woodbury, pen name Clara Hume (author of Bird Song: A Novella) compare their individual approaches to writing about climate and ecological changes.
1. Future vs. Near future: When does ‘near’ become ‘far?’ How do the world-building challenges differ?
Marjorie: Far-future often extends into the infinite, as humanity is imagined to spread across the universe. Exciting, mind-expanding, but not something you can expect to experience personally. So, because I want the reader to walk in my characters’ shoes, Glimmer is insistently near-future, and the world building an honest try at realistic projection. Therefore, a mix of the familiar with the new and strange offers the reader both a secure handhold and the thrill of discovery, be it horrifying or heartening.
Mary: Bird Song: A Novella starts as contemporary but then travels to the far-past and back again, at which time there's an alt-history perspective. So, there is not a typical near- or far-future narrative. In Bird Song, the world-building is speculative and imaginary, and incorporates mythological stories from the past. I guess the challenges I faced were similar to any time-travel paradoxes that authors write about, not to mention how characters can move around in time.
2. When you create a future world, what aspects of daily life do you most focus on to show the changes from the present?
Marjorie: Changes in what’s most familiar to a reader can shape a future world without resorting to excess exposition: fashion, technology, home décor, transportation, information related directly to the story line.
When I’m writing, the external environment fills my mind’s eye cinematically: what my characters see and inhabit, what they walk past, the objects they interact with, the food they eat. But this is an outward-looking point of view, so I often must remind myself to let my protagonist(s) glance in a mirror now and then, so the reader can visualize them as well.
Mary: In Bird Song, the world enters our far past, when gods and goddesses allegedly existed. The island was an Eden, and it had its guardians (the Greek Sirens). A young, college-age woman, Thelsie, falls into that world from modern-day Chicago, so she explores the island. It's a strange place: mysterious, haunted, has a charnel ground, and so on. I wasn't writing about a future world but an otherworld. During the evolution of the story, the young women realizes that the island would someday succumb to climate change, maybe even be flooded over. She also understands that after her arrival, those changes begin to take place at a rapid pace; it's a conventional paradox of time travel. The time warps in the story do go from past to future, but future in this case is just our present day.
3. Does writing about the future require a futuristic style or voice?
Marjorie: I hugely admire envisioned futures that feature an evolved version of the language, either partial as in a salting of invented slang (Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange) or whole-hog, as in Russell Hoban’s brilliant Riddley Walker.
But…like reading Chaucer in the original, or even Shakespeare, too much unfamiliarity is a barrier to comprehension, to faith in the narrative, and even to enjoyment. While many feel that deciphering Riddley Walker’s devolved English is part of the fun, it’s also exhausting until you ‘learn’ the language. As language is never the point of my novels, I don’t want to make my readers work that hard.
And it takes real expertise to predict where language will go. Even current slang can seem random. Like, fifty years ago (hardly far ahead for a future story line), who would have guessed that, apparently thanks to Alice Cooper, the word “sick” would come to mean cool, great, or awesome?
So, unless you’re a philologist (like Tolkien) or possess a rare perfect ear, sussing out the future of a language is essentially guesswork. Even if lightly applied, it can become self-conscious, popping the reader out of the flow to struggle with the meaning of a word or usage, undermining her engagement with the story line.
Mary: I've done future writing but did not take on a futuristic style or voice. In my debut novel, Back to the Garden, however, I tried to write a few accents, but looking back, I think I went a little far with it and completely avoided it in the sequel of that book.
4. Do you prefer writing about natural or built environments?
Marjorie: Writing in a natural setting is certainly more pleasurable. It can bring out the poet in any writer. But climate affects both, and cities, being the work of man, seem more reflective of human culture in all its ills and horrors, beauties and wonders. Also, an urban landscape can quickly set the time, place, and tone of a story. Nature tends to be timeless, and self-generated. Nature renews itself (if allowed). Cities require a functioning society to survive.
On the other hand, nothing is sadder than a sick or dying natural world, which is of course one of the major themes of climate fiction. So, where I set a story depends entirely on its thematic and emotional needs. But I’ve generally stayed away from ultra-futuristic, high-tech environments. Just not my sensibility.
Mary: I prefer writing about nature; some of my favorite writing comes from authors who name species and describe their habitats, traits, colors, sounds, and so on. In Bird Song, there's a touch of the weird, so animals, plants, insects, and so on have strange attributes, like being bigger than usual or more vivid. The story takes place on an island, too, with no built environments around.
5. Has apocalypse lost its narrative power and become too much of a cliché?
Marjorie: We live on the verge of apocalypse, but who wants to curl up with doom and gloom every night? Yet I feel a duty to call attention to the situation, as a sort of summons to action.
Meanwhile, every book needs an ending, so if you set your reader up for Apocalypse, you’ll need a suitable, satisfying resolution: save the world up or blow it up?
After much of a lifetime reading SF and Fantasy, I’ve developed an aversion to only-the-hero/heroine-can-save-the-world scenarios. I mean, c’mon, if this was possible, someone would’ve done it already. Yet here we are, hurtling merrily toward catastrophic climate change.
I want to look at real solutions, not the only but the possible, and not just the scientific but the socio-cultural. I believe it will take a village to save the world, because it will take a village (or more) to assemble the necessary batch of skills. So, I tend to write about groups of normal but determined people working together to solve a given problem – focusing on one or more of them as POV characters, yes, but it’s never the lone sword against the multitude.
Mary: I think it is becoming that way, but fiction dealing with nature allows for narratives other than apocalypse, which is good. I think with the world being the way it is, apocalyptic writing is becoming too depressing for a lot of people to read in their spare time. The world is already scary. People read for different reasons, but sometimes it's just to escape or learn something. To go along with the above, how do we write apocalypse but without complete grimdark, and instead try to build empowering characters who inspire positive outcomes?
Some new storytelling genres have come around in the past few years, including solarpunk, lunarpunk, and hopepunk. These seem to be more positive. These genres fight the status quo and offer more refreshing narratives. They recognize the world as it is and provide a story that we can build a better world. But you also don't really need to write in those genres to achieve empowerment, equality, renewable energies, and so on. You can write these stories in any genre.
6. What goes into your decisions about narrative point of view, i.e., 1st, 3rd, omniscient?
Marjorie: Glimmer is in 1st person, as I wanted to tell a very personal story that the reader would experience as the central character does, often misunderstanding or misinterpreting, then edging closer to the truth as information and understanding improve – in short, an unreliable narrator. This does present problems: you can’t give the reader anything that the 1st person doesn’t see or hear unless someone else tells the narrator about it in dialogue. Excepting Harmony, my previous books were written in close 3rd or with the advantage of an omniscient narrator, both of which offer greater flexibility for providing story and information. In Harmony, I used interpolated media posts to supply extra information to a 1st person narrative, but even that device can pull the reader away from close identification with the protagonist.
Mary: I wrote Bird Song in 1st person, which seems more lenient in allowing a perspective where the reader won't know everything that a 3rd person narrative provides, so you can build more mystery that way.
7. Was there some personal experience with weather or climate change that drew you to write such fiction?
Marjorie: I grew up on the Massachusetts coast with hurricanes blowing through every late summer and fall. Boats and docks would be destroyed. Fishermen would lose their livelihoods. People would drown in rip tides. Nothing like the superstorms we’re seeing due to climate change, but to a child, the power of wind and water was terrifying. Where I live now, in upstate New York, we’ve had two catastrophic “hundred-year” floods in less than 20 years. Makes a person think.
Mary: When I began writing climate change into my stories (Wild Mountain series and Bird Song), it was around 2008 or so, and at that time I had not had personal experience with the kind of short-term extreme weather brought on by long-term climate changes. However, since then I've experienced droughts, wildfires that were too close for comfort, and now a more active hurricane season on the East Coast of Canada.
8. How can writers help readers face the realities of climate change?
Marjorie: By exploring possible solutions to living with climate change, as it seems unlikely the world will ever summon the will to stop or fix it, at least in the near term. We can write stories about facing the worst and adapting, about finding courage and ingenuity, about lives in a climate changed world that still have meaning and hope. We can show that humans don’t have to share the fate of the dinosaurs.
Mary: I think the best way is by reaching the reader's heart and writing a story that will touch people and make them think. Though I think polemics can help change narratives in society, I prefer fiction to be an art form; preaching and fear-mongering are not good ways to go about storytelling, unless it's just part of the genre (like horror, possibly).
9. What would you consider is unique about your novel's approach to climate change?
Marjorie: It’s a meme in the study of dramatic literature that, according to Aristotle, there are only five stories in all of drama. So, uniqueness is a hard quality to claim. But the writer’s voice – or the voice(s) given to her characters – is what will make those familiar stories individual and fresh each time. Glimmer is an up-close and personal tale, like taking a walk with a new friend whispering in your ear, experiencing with her the psychic and emotional burdens of climate change as well as its external perils, and swept along as she discovers selfhood and strength.
Mary: Bird Song is experimental and genre-blurring. It includes a modern reimagining of the Greek Sirens, Circe, and other mythological characters. It's also weird, in that the island's plants and animals are different, larger, more vivid—and the island itself takes on strange properties. Time travel is also present, with the main character, Thelsie, moving from our present day to the past to our present day again, all while considering how climate change will affect the island in the future.
Find out more about Bird Song and Glimmer
Marjorie B. Kellogg leads a double life as theatrical set designer and writer, especially of climate fiction. Her books include Glimmer (2021), Lear’s Daughters, The Dragon Quartet, Harmony, and A Rumor of Angels. Locally, she is Editor of The New Franklin Register and has written many articles for theatrical publications.
Mary Woodbury writes fiction under the pen name Clara Hume and lives with her husband and cats in Nova Scotia. She's the author of the Wild Mountain series and Bird Song. She works as a technical writer and localization specialist. Mary co-founded the Rewilding Our Stories Discord, runs Dragonfly.eco—an exploration of world eco-fiction—and has written guest articles at Impakter, Chicago Review of Books, Artists & Climate Change, Ecology Action Centre, and more. Some of her other hobbies are hiking, gardening, bird-watching, and amateur photography.
Get creative for the planet: Creative letter-writing
Create The Future are running a virtual creative 'climate cafe' this month for Great Big Green Week for those who want to take climate action from the comfort of their own home, in community with other like-minded people. Log in with a cup of tea or coffee, bring your imagination, and learn how to write a 'postcard from the future' to help persuade your local changemakers to take action on the climate crisis.
Are you concerned about the climate crisis, but not sure how to make your words have a real-world impact?
Do you sometimes feel alone in your climate anxiety, and want to meet a likeminded community while amplifying the potential reach of your efforts?
Are you interested in learning to communicate with politicians and changemakers to demand action and make your voice stand out?
Would you like to give yourself an hour of accountability and self-care, to express your thoughts through art and writing and turn climate emotions into action?
The event is FREE and open to all ages - just sign up via Eventbrite to find out more: www.createthefuture.earth/event.
Special Climate Change Issue of Shoreline of Infinity Magazine - Kickstarter Live now!
Award-winning Edinburgh-based science fiction magazine, Shoreline of Infinity, have just launched a Kickstarter to help fund their Special Climate Change Issue which will be published in September. The issue will include flash fiction, short stories, reviews, interviews, poetry, and non-fiction, from newer to more established authors like climate-fiction great Kim Stanley Robinson. Rewards include pre-orders of the issue, artwork, discounts on back issues, and more. This issue will be Guest-Edited by Lyndsey Croal, who as well as being an author and occasional Editor, also works in climate and nature policy and advocacy in her day job. You can find out more about and support the Kickstarter here.
Solutions Spotlight
In this week’s extract from a novel including a climate solution, here is an extract from ‘No More Fairy Tales: Stories to Save Our Planet’. This is an anthology of 24 short stories, each with climate solutions at their heart. This has an associated website showing how to make each solution a reality.
This extract is from ‘Frackers’ by Martin Hastie – a story set in Australia about out of work frackers.
‘So, Donna, here’s a thought. Could we get carbon credits if we were able to shut down a long-term source of CO2?’ Mick asked.
‘Maybe. Things like that depend on protocols being in place. But there are loads of new ones being written all the time.’
‘So could we put out coal seam fires? Like the one that’s been burning for thousands of years down the road at Wingen there, at Burning Mountain?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe, I guess.’
‘So,’ said Mick, ‘spinning off the top of my head…how’s this for a plan? We’re going drilling. Drilling for carbon credits.’
Clive raised his head from its position side-down on the bar.
‘What the hell are you talking about?” he asked. ‘Maybe it’s time to call your old mother to pick us up. You’ve drunk too much already.’
‘Hear me out,’ said Mick, warming to his theme. ‘I’ve been thinking about this for a while. We drill, right? We’re born to drill. So we’re going to do some drilling that helps stop unnecessary emissions and helps slow down the climate crisis. It’s a crazy job and it seems no one is doing it. But we can.’