Tag Archives: cli-fi

Note: The American book cover pictured here irks me a bit since both female main characters are described as having dark hair.

Core Text:

Itaranta, Emmi. Memory of Water. Harper Voyager, 2014.

Summary:

In Emmi Itaranta’s futuristic dystopian world, global warming has significantly melted the polar ice caps, drastically changing the Earth’s geography. Large coastal cities were drowned when the rising oceans vastly altered shorelines. Salt water has intruded into freshwater resources thus drinking water is scarce and the most coveted commodity.

Seventeen-year-old Noria Kaito lives with her parents in a small village on the outskirts of the city Xinjing within the Scandinavian Union, now occupied by the power state of New Qian. Noria is training to become a tea master like her father, a profession which is controversial and challenging for a female to earn. When Noria’s mother moves to the city to take a position at the University of Xinjing, her father completes her tea master instruction which includes finally revealing to her a hidden natural freshwater spring in the fells just near their home which they must protect. Shortly after her tea master graduation ceremony, Noria’s father becomes ill, leaving her to tend to their home, the tea house, and the secret spring all on her own.

Noria’s life-long best friend, Sanja, is her only trusted companion. Together they navigate the wartime oppression as they line up at a single pump with fellow villagers to fill jugs with their weekly water allowance. They get pleas to spare a cup of water from scared mothers holding their sick babies while waiting in line to receive medical care from the severely understaffed and ill-equipped hospital.

As an escape from the horrors of everyday life, Noria and Sanja frequent the plastic grave on the outskirts of their village to hunt for unlikely treasures from the past-world era. Sanja is a tech wiz and spends her time in her workshop immersed in restoring the items that the pair recover. After finding buried hidden discs at the secret spring and a busted player in the plastic grave which Sanja repairs, the two learn that the recordings contain documentation of an unfinished expedition to the Lost Lands which leads them to plot their own journey in hopes of completing the mission that the team of scientific researchers could not.

Emmi Itaranta tells Memory of Water at an unhurried and cool pace like the gradual trickle of water through earth and rock. Yet there is something ethereal and enchanting about her prose that keeps the reader engaged in this deep story and the characters whose secrets shape their purpose and path as intricately as water carves stone.

Teaching Resources:

Atwood, Margaret. “Time Capsule Found on the Dead Planet.” The Guardian, 25 September 2009. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/sep/26/margaret-atwood-mini-science-fiction

In this short text, Margaret Atwood conveys a somber mythical tale illuminating the ages of Humankind. Humanity has risen and fallen and what is left of our great civilization is the writing on a brass cylinder. Atwood invokes the personal and emotional by transfixing the perspective of the reader to that of an outsider, presumably the one finding this profound remnant of history during an archaeological quest. This mirror-like effect parallels the situation in Memory of Water, of Noria and Sanja discovering remnants from the past-world era and trying to piece together their meaning and significance from history. The theme of tracing origins in both works highlights present action and future imaginaries in addressing climate change.

Dawson, Ashley. “Cape Town’s water has a new apartheid” The Washington Post, 10 July 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/theworldpost/wp/2018/07/10/cape-town/

This poignant article describes the water crisis in Cape Town, South Africa during late 2017 into early 2018 that was successfully staved off, at least for the time being. Although water was guaranteed as a human right in South Africa’s new constitution, access to water is unequal. Municipalities have yet to provide sufficient infrastructure to many low-income areas where residents must trek a long distance to wait in line at scare communal taps and lug their water home while wealthy neighborhoods consume water freely and in excess. Memory of Water is an allegory of this real-life circumstance that will become more urgent as impacts from climate change are experienced. The novel highlights the social injustice associated with water scarcity experienced by the disadvantaged village residents on the outskirts of the large city and well as the government’s role in affording access to a basic necessity.  

Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard, 2013.

Nixon’s innovative concept of “slow violence” focuses on the gradual and often out of sight violence on vulnerable communities wrought by climate change. Precarious ecosystems and poor, disempowered populations suffer the brunt of the climate crisis which they had little influence on causing. In Memory of Water the village where Noria lives is kept isolated and uninformed as to the larger happenings in the world but the ever-looming military presence restricts what they are allowed to do and where they are permitted to go. Not having access to plentiful water supplies or adequate health care causes much suffering in the village and some residents even resort to filling up jugs of water from a contaminated stream near the plastic grave just to have enough to drink or bathe with.

Discussion Questions:

  1. Margaret Atwood alludes to what has transpired in the history of Humankind in “Time Capsule Found on the Dead Planet” similar to how Emmi Itaranta largely infers the events of the past-world era in Memory of Water. Noria and Sanja find bits and pieces of history that they must make sense from to gain knowledge of the past, present, and future. Interestingly, they also make a game out of creating and hiding time capsules of their own containing random personal objects and inscribing them with date indicating when they may be opened again. What are the effects of this practice of encapsulating history on those that create these memorials of the past and on those that discover them? Why is this such a powerful tool in telling stories and what does this say about human nature and our relationship to time and space?
  2. Though Noria and Sanja are best friends, their backgrounds are very different. Noria’s father is a respected tea master, her mother is college professor, and they live in a nice and spacious and home at the edge of the village that has been in their family for generations. Sanja’s family life and living conditions, on the other hand, are described as much less affluent. How do the socio-economic disparities between the friends come into play throughout the novel? In what ways are they treated differently by the other characters in the story especially the military enforcement? How do their backgrounds affect the decisions each of them make and ultimately their fate?
  3. Noria is more privileged than most in her village largely because she has access to the hidden natural freshwater spring that her father and past ancestors have been protecting. She must still make her presence a few times a week at the communal pump and try not to appear as though she has bathed so frequently in order to keep her secret. But when the situation in her village gradually worsens she decides that she will help others in need and as a result she marked as a water criminal with a painted blue circle on her door and is imprisoned in her own home to await her final judgement. Why did the military look the other way when Noria’s father was alive though they had suspicions that the Kaito’s had been harboring a secret water source? How does sharing her water with others in her community threaten the authority of the military and jeopardize their attrition warfare strategies?

The Crystal World by J.G. Ballard

Core Text

Ballard, J.G. The Crystal World. Jonathan Cape, 1966

Summary

The Crystal World was J.G. Ballard’s fourth novel in what has come to known among his devotees as the “disaster series.” Written in 1966 before “global warming” and “climate change” became common parlance and a genre dedicated to such phenomena was born, the ensuing years and ominous climatic discoveries have elevated Ballard as the godfather of “cli-fi.” The book begins with Dr. Sanders on the bow of a steamer that has delayed disembarkation for unknown reasons at Port Mattare, and, already, Ballard alerts the reader to pay attention to the environment: “…surface of the water was still gray and sluggish, leaching away the somber tinctures of the collapsing vegetation along the banks”; “…the dark green arbors towering into the dull air like immense cypresses, somber and motionless, touched only by faint gleams of light.” The location of the port is somewhere in the Republic of Cameroon, which “was still recovering from an abortive coup ten years earlier, when a handful of rebels had seized the emerald and diamond mines at Mont Royal…” Along with ecological details that signal unease, signifiers crowd the first few paragraphs: Sanders, a doctor who treats leprosy; Father Balthus, a priest in dark soutane; Ventress, a Belgian architect dressed in a white suit who tells Sanders, “This is a landscape without time.”; and the letter from Suzanne, the wife of Sanders’ colleague and his lover, which ends with at once luminous and ominous line, “The light touches everything with diamonds and sapphires.” 

Suzanne is the reason for Sanders’ journey. She and her husband had disappeared into the forest in Mont Royal to found a leprosy clinic. Balthus, Ventress, Suzanne, along with Thorensen, the director of the diamond mine, are all characters Sanders would encounter again as he ventures deeper into the jungle and realizes the “faint gleams of light” are in fact emanating from the mysterious crystallization of the forest and its living creatures, and each of them functions as a moral catalyst for Sanders. The scientific reasoning behind the efflorescence of crystal Ballarad gives is lacking but useful: an infinite atomic duplication of itself, capable of filling the entire universe and whose behavior is closest to cancer. As crystallization spreads and consumes every organism in its path, Sanders’ interior journey reverses course and the objective becomes running away from the forest in order to escape the fate of turning into a crystalline form. Along the way, Sanders finds out that crystallization is not an isolated phenomenon but is occurring in Florida and Russia also. In Ballard’s fossilized world, the crystal is a stand-in for time: Crystallization process requires “leaking time” and fossilization evinces time frozen. It’s also human’s race against time in the face of nature’s transgression – to run from being fossilized within the crystal or to embrace it. Sanders and company, in the end, come to a revelation that running is futile, so they remain or return to the forest to live in timelessness, to exist between death and life, which for them is some kind of utopia. 

Teaching Resources

  • Heller, Jason. “These Cli-Fi Classics Are Cautionary Tales For Today.” NPR, July 26, 2019. Heller starts this “beach reads” recommendation by injecting an ominous climate anecdote – “As yet another record-breaking summer heats up…” – and goes on to offer summaries of five cli-fi titles. He praises The Crystal World as a work that surpasses Ballard’s previous books – The Burning World, The Drowned World and The Wind from Nowhere – in his “disaster series.” Heller also draws a parallel with Heart of Darkness, an influence Ballard dismissed based on the fact that he hadn’t read it at the time of writing The Crystal World. Still, it is unmistakable that in both fictions, post-colonial malaise is manifested as geological transgressions which in turn engenders extreme human reaction to them.   
  • O’Connell, Mark, “Why We Are Living in JG Ballard’s World.” New Statesman, April 1 2020. With the pandemic very much in the foreground, this essay makes a convincing case that our current mysophobic existence owes more to Ballard’s dystopian vision than to any realms prognosticated by other postmodern authors. Indeed, Ballardian world is the one we occupy now – uneasy and distanced: “The rapid transition, under the new viral order, into further extremes of technological alienation has only made it more so.” Ballard’s short stories like “Having a Wonderful Time” (1982) and “The Intensive Care Unit” (1977) speak more directly to quarantine, human-weariness, and invisible captor. His “World” series encapsulates another set of mental stressors, anxiety and psychological displacement induced by environmental entropy. O’Connell is well aware of Ballard’s complicated early life – a White British settler family in Shanghai forced into internment camp under Japanese occupation during WWII – and draws a connection between Ballard’s experience with imperialism with upended-ness that often undergirds his characters’ psyche and the environment that occupies them. 
  • Clark, Jim, “Reading Climate Change in J.G. Ballard.” Critical Survey, Vol. 25, No. 2, Berghahn Books, 2013, pp. 7-21. Clark, in his prismatic analysis, does a great job linking climate change post hoc to The Drowned World (1962) and The Crystal World (1966), and critiquing the post-cli-fi hermeneutics of climate dystopias in these texts. Clark’s thesis is most persuasive when drawing out the inner world, the psyche, of Ballard’s characters when faced with environmental upheaval, as the locus of transformation: “The outer environment is subordinated to inner space, and what action or response it requires is primarily internal and transformative.” Time is another essential thematic component. Clark asserts that “Ballard conflates environment and time” and equates climatic disruption to temporal disruption. Timelessness of the crystal is a metaphor for the end of time, or surrender to time, which then is rendered as the end of environment. Expounding on the ways in which Ballardian climatic transgressions have been prescient of the environmental malaise to come, Clark also draws an analogy between the efflorescence of crystal and a viral infection prefiguring a pandemic narrative that became familiar in later cli-fi genre and eerily apropos of the current viral pandemic. 

Discussion Questions

  1. In planting a white doctor who presumably treats African leper patients amidst diamond and emerald mines then setting him off into a forest that turns him into the very element of seduction and exploitation, does Ballard’s post-colonial duality subvert the “resource curse”?
  2. Ballard has said that his central characters in his “climate” novels see the “system of imaginative possibilities represented by the disaster,” which Clark infers as follow, that “if Ballard conflates climate with time, he also conflates it with psyche.” Both insinuate that by confronting the disaster on an existential level, one can then harness the inner capacity for transcendence. This seems like a bit of channeling an utopian outcome in a dystopian situation, which is essentially what many of the climate accords are. In reality, when so many seem to have gone back to life as “normal” even after facing an existential threat of climate catastrophe, can individual psychical transformation be a real catalyst for “profound personal change” as Clark argues?
  3. In climate discourse and science, human anxiety is intrinsically tied to time, which acts as a simultaneously passive and aggressive omnipresent element. The race to keep the rise of global temperature below 1.5°C  to avoid the irreversible chain of events is itself a race against time’s irreversibility. Ballard seems to suggest that surrendering to time, therefore reaching a form of utopian timelessness, is a noble, even a moral thing to do. How does this square with the psyche being the catalyst for profound change?