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BY THE BOOK
BOOKS
Five sparkling reads to have
on your cli-fi list
CAUTIONARY Gun Island by Amitav
TALES Random House, 2019)
Ghosh (Penguin
A quest to unravel the
legend of the enigmatic
Despite what the head-buried-in-increasingly-hot-sand Gun Merchant, the novel
features freaky weather,
deniers of climate change say, the future of our planet inexplicable forest fires,
is bleak. And whenever the world is a bewildering and Bengali folklore.
hot mess, hasn’t fiction helped make sense of it all? The Overstory by
Harsimran Gill tracks the rise of ‘cli-fi’ Richard Powers (William
Heinemann, 2018)
A novel about nine
Americans who are
In his book The Great Derangement story collection Florida (William brought together by their
(Penguin Random House, 2016), au- Heinemann, 2018) infuses an acute connection to trees, it won
thor Amitav Ghosh lamented fiction’s sense of climate anxiety in a landscape the 2019 Pulitzer Prize
lack of engagement with climate of panthers, snakes and cruel weather, for Fiction.
change, a crisis that “asks us to imag- while C Morgan Babst’s The Floating
ine other forms of human existence.” World (Algonquin Books, 2017), set A Cloud Called Bhura
And recently, authors and publishers after Hurricane Katrina, is a sensitive by Bijal Vachharajani
have stepped up to the task, with a pro- tale of loss. (Talking Cub, 2019)
liferation of recent ‘cli-fi’ books that Indian publishing, however, has not In this compelling and
tackle climate change head-on. The seen a similar surge, with just a hand- entertaining YA novel,
term was popularised by English ful of recent novels tackling the sub- Mumbai wakes up one
teacher Dan Bloom nearly a decade ject. But even as works of ecological morning to a poisonous
ago, but as a sub-genre of science fic- fiction like Shubhangi Swarup’s Lati- brown cloud spreading
across its skies.
tion, it has a long history—from Jules tudes Of Longing (HarperCollins
Verne’s 1889 novel, The Purchase Of India, 2018) emerge, publishers say
The North Pole that features climate the issue remains in the preserve of Ambiguity Machines: And
Other Stories by Vandana
change due to the shifting of the speculative fiction. Ghosh, however, Singh (Zubaan, 2018)
Earth’s axis, to Octavia Butler’s Para- thinks it’s only a matter of time. “As A deeply imagined
ble Of The Sower published in 1993, Margaret Atwood has said, the phrase collection of speculative
which holds a tinge of optimism for its ‘climate change’ is inadequate; what stories in a South Asian
characters plagued by global warming. we are confronting today is ‘everything setting that upturns all
Most of these, however, are set in change’,” he tells Vogue. Pointing to a stereotypes in looking at
far-off dystopian futures. Today, when study that predicts Mumbai might be the near future.
the perils of the climate crisis are im- underwater by 2050, Ghosh adds,
mediate, there’s no such luxury. Many “This reality is something that has to The History Of
titles in the new wave turn away from be confronted in everything that is Bees by Maja Lunde
the crystal ball to look at our present. written about Mumbai today, whether (Simon & Schuster,
2015)
This is exemplified by Richard Pow- it is a love story or an epic novel.” A dazzling novel that
ers’s The Overstory (William Heine- While we figure out how to avert this follows three generations
mann, 2018), an evocative novel about crisis, at least our bookshelves will be of beekeepers and
a last stand to save America’s grateful in the meantime, possibly imagines a world without
forests. Lauren Groff’s short holding out hope in the process. n these vital insects.
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124 VOGUE INDIA JANUARY 2020www.vogue.in
