IN LING MA鈥橲 Bliss Montage, the discomforts that define everyday reality are stretched and deformed until they detonate like a balloon that has been twisted too tightly.
Ma, whose 2018 novel, Severance, won the Kirkus Prize for Fiction, uses short stories to work through the barbed scenarios in her latest book. These include a frenemy so diabolical she can make you disappear, a woman who marries for financial security but finds that her husband can literally only speak in 鈥�$$$鈥�, and a professor mired in academia鈥檚 tedium and backbiting who finds a hidden door behind a filing cabinet.
Ma鈥檚 book can be eaten in one gulp. This is partly because the stories are so fluidly written, partly because they are connected, but maybe most importantly because they draw on the tropes of fantasy.
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All of this applies to Christopher Priest鈥檚 Expect Me Tomorrow, too. After a summer of unprecedented evidence of global heating in many parts of the world, his new book feels like a cool rain shower.
It is set half in the 19th century, half in 2050, and uses real findings from glaciology to link the times. Priest reinforces these parallels by populating both story arcs with twin protagonists: the 19th-century Beck twins and the Ramsey twins in the 21st century. Then there is the matter of setting up a literal 鈥渘eural link鈥� between these pairs of characters.
What makes Priest鈥檚 fantastical tale so provocative is that a lot of it has some basis in reality. There was a real Adolf Beck, who was jailed for fraud in the 1890s, and some of the other 19th-century characters did study facets of an already changing climate, such as the Gulf Stream and glaciers.
Most of the predictions in the 2050 half of the book are based on the same models that inspired David Wallace-Wells鈥檚 book, The Uninhabitable Earth, which is prominent in Priest鈥檚 bibliography.
But the sly parallels between the 19th century and what happens in the 2050s might land Priest in hot water. His book veers perilously close to some of the perennial talking points that dodge human responsibility for climate change, such as the role of solar cycles, volcanoes and the rest.
In fact, Priest uses these plot points for a wholly different purpose. We must be extremely clear: he doesn鈥檛 contend that human-made climate change is false. The fantasy he builds doesn鈥檛 insult climate science at all; it just opens new doors to reimagining its outcome. And this is what climate fiction needs today, more than another nihilistic screed or terrifying scenario.
Right now, something about the way we think has ossified. We seem to have agreed that the climate is doomed and every year will be hotter until we all die. Once a narrative acquires the status of received wisdom, it can be difficult to see beyond it or even around it. What if we could shake ourselves out of this 鈥渄oomerist鈥� trance that has taken hold?
Risky as it is, Priest鈥檚 gambit almost feels like a public service. Fantasy is the defining genre of our time, wrote James Marriott in a recent article in The Times: 鈥淔antasy answers a peculiar modern need 鈥� for history perhaps, or for an alternative reality invested with profounder significances than our own.鈥� I would add that it imbues readers with a sense that not everything can be known, that we might still be surprised or find cause for hope.
How else are we going to get up the energy to do anything about climate change?
Sally Adee is a technology and聽science writer based in聽London. Follow her on Twitter @sally_adee
