Tuesday, February 20, 2024

Eight dystopian novels that explore hope in the climate crisis

Scott Guild received his MFA from the New Writers Project at the University of Texas at Austin, and his PhD in English from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. He served for years as assistant director of Pen City Writers, a prison writing initiative for incarcerated students. He is currently an assistant professor at Marian University in Indianapolis, where he teaches literature and creative writing. Before his degrees, Scott was the songwriter and lead guitarist for the new wave band New Collisions, which toured with the B-52s and opened for Blondie.

Guild's new novel is Plastic.

At Electric Lit he tagged eight novels with a theme of hope, a "core value that their characters need in order to endure and fight the climate crisis, but difficult to maintain in the face of so many challenges." One title on the list:
The Light Pirate by Lily Brooks-Dalton

Set in a near-future Florida, this vivid, intimate novel shows several decades in the life of Wanda Lowe, a woman born while a disastrous hurricane bears down on her state. In the years that follow Wanda’s birth, Florida will be largely abandoned and then finally “closed” as a state, “as if it were a rundown theme park with a roller coaster that was no longer safe to ride.” Wanda, however, will remain in Florida, along with her friend and teacher Phyllis, finding ways to survive amid the beauty and danger of a landscape returning to wilderness. A book that shows our deep bonds to nature even in the midst of climate disaster, the novel centers its optimism in Wanda’s enduring links to her environment, which—as the title suggests—remain radiant and luminescent despite the crumbling of human infrastructures.
Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue