20 Aug 2011 03:20:25
I'm With the Bears, taking its title from environmentalist John Muir's comment that "when it comes to a war between the races, I'm with the bears", will also feature stories by TC Boyle, Helen Simpson, Toby Litt, Paolo Bacigalupi and Kim Stanley Robinson. Out this October from radical press Verso, it is a response, said the publisher, to the absence of creative fiction dealing with climate change, an issue raised by Ian McEwan in the Guardian last year.
Mitchell, twice shortlisted for the Man Booker prize, has imagined a near future in which oil sells for $800 a barrel in his story The Siphoners. Acclaimed short story writer Boyle has written an account of early eco-activists in The Siskiyou, July 1989, while Nathaniel Rich's Hermie is a comic fantasy about a marine biologist haunted by his youth. The stories range from science fiction to literary fiction, from past to present to future, and, said Verso, "aim to bring our probable future within the grasp of our comprehension ... to provide a sense of what life might be like in a world past fossil fuel [and to bring] a human reality to disasters of inhuman proportions".
The Hugo and Nebula award-winning science fiction author Bacigalupi's The Tamarisk Hunter focuses on drought in the American south-west, a water-scarce environment in which the rights for water are centrally allocated. "You get to experience a bit of the drought and you also get to experience how the western states have chosen to manage the crisis," Bacigalupi said. "One of the interesting things about western water law is that higher rights-holders have an absolute right to their full share of water, whereas lower rights-holders can be turned off if there's a 'call' on their rights. So a city like Phoenix, which has terrible water rights, can theoretically be turned off, while a city like Las Vegas continues to thrive and enjoy its full allocation during a time of scarcity. All of that is ridiculously dry and boring if you try to describe it in the abstract, but fiction gives us an opportunity to experience the implications of water law viscerally. Hopefully that also means that it will help make one aspect of the climate change scenario more meaningful than, say, reading the IPCC XYZ Assessment Report."
Bacigalupi said that the topic of climate change is "so loaded with speculative uncertainties that it seems like there are unlimited potential stories to write and explore".
"It feels relevant and it feels uncharted and it feels worthwhile, which are criteria that I look for when I write. The questions global warming raises, not only about how the world is changing but also how we choose to adapt to those changes, make for fertile creative ground. When I write, I want to be writing about the most pressing questions of today. Climate change more than satisfies that requirement for me," he said. "I see something like climate change as being one of those big uncertainty events which will redefine how we understand the world around us. A before/after event. We don't recognise how dependent we are on climactic stability. I think we're right on the verge of thinking about human history as pre and post global warming."
