The Guardian view on climate fiction: no longer the stuff of sci-fi
The five novels include Orbital by Samantha Harvey, set during one day on the International Space Station and the winner of last year's Booker prize; time-travelling romcom The Ministry of Time from debut novelist Kaliane Bradley; eco-thriller Briefly Very Beautiful by Roz Dineen; And So I Roar, about a young girl in Nigeria, by Abi Daré; and a story of migrants in an abandoned city in Téa Obreht's The Morningside. All the shortlisted authors are women.
Climate fiction is not new. Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam dystopian trilogy, Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic The Road, Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behaviour and Richard Power's Pulitzer-prize-winning The Overstory are just some of the landmark literary novels to have taken on the crisis. Science fiction, inevitably, has become the genre of ecological catastrophe, with hits like Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future (Barack Obama was a fan), which opens in 2025 with all the inhabitants of a small Indian town dying in a heatwave.
The late Ursula K Le Guin wrote that the job of sci-fi was 'to extrapolate imaginatively from current trends and events to a near-future that's half prediction, half satire'. The job of the realist novel is to reflect the world in which we live. For a long time, the possibilities of environmental breakdown were largely considered too wild for the realism. As a result, climate fiction hasn't been taken seriously enough. In The Great Derangement in 2016, Amitav Gosh argued that the failure of so many novelists, including himself, to address the most urgent issue of the age was part of a broader cultural failure at the heart of the climate crisis itself.
Freakish weather events are no longer the stuff of speculative fiction – 'global weirding' is upon us. What was once dubbed 'cli-fi' is simply contemporary fiction. Ecological anxiety is as much a part of the fictional worlds of a young generation of novelists like Sally Rooney as the internet and mobile phones.
The novels on the Climate Fiction prize shortlist do not conform to dystopian stereotypes. Some aren't explicitly about the crisis. Some are even hopeful. Far from being a portrait of a world ravaged by disasters, Orbital, for example, is a hymn to the awe-inspiring beauty of our planet.
It could be argued that having a Booker prize winner on the shortlist suggests there is no need for a specific award, which might marginalise climate fiction as a niche genre. There is no shortage of literary gongs. The Wainwright prize, set up in 2014 to celebrate the best nature books, now includes an award for writing on global conservation.
Yet awards amplify the message and reach of books that might otherwise be overlooked. Scientists have been warning about global heating's dire consequences for decades. Governments and industry haven't listened. Now novelists are taking up the challenge. Stories can create an impact far greater than data alone. They can inspire change. In a world where reality has become stranger than fiction, this new prize is necessary and important. There is no bigger story.
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Time Out
2 days ago
- Time Out
Where is ‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North' filmed? The locations behind Jacob Elordi's World War II epic
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The National
2 days ago
- The National
Lost traditional wheat varieties feature in film shot around Oban
Now, 14 years later, the wheat grown by his sustainable charity is featuring in a new film which has been shot around Oban with support from local craftspeople and businesses. Alongside being a stunning, genre-defying visual experience, Harvest involves Scotland The Bread, a sustainable food charity which grows some of the varieties of wheat traditionally grown here. Their expert input helped bring to life the striking wheat fields featured throughout the film, rooting the visuals in Scotland's agricultural past, adding depth to themes of harvest and renewal. Based on Jim Crace's Booker Prize short-listed novel of the same name, Harvest has just opened in cinemas in the UK and Ireland before being released exclusively on streaming service MUBI on August 8. The film was shot entirely within the Argyllshire countryside, including the picturesque glen of Inverlonan, and drew extensively on local talent, with members of the community joining the film's cast as villagers and supporting crew. It's hoped the film will also help bring Scotland The Bread to the public's attention. The Fife-based sustainable food charity is a collaborative project to establish a Scottish flour and bread supply that is healthy, locally controlled and sustainable – in other words, to promote and develop a 'People's Bread'. 'Our idea is simple – grow nutritious wheat and bake it properly close to home,' the charity's co-founder Andrew Whitley, below, told the Sunday National. 'Working together, we can change the entire system for the better – fair deals for local farmers growing nourishing food for people, fewer damaging food miles, more nutrition in every slice of bread and more jobs per loaf as we skill up community bakers to bring out the best in our local grains.' The charity was founded in 2016 by Whitley and Veronica Burke who worked with scientists in leading institutions to research heritage Scottish and Nordic wheats to find nutrient-rich varieties that do well in local conditions. In November 2017, the charity launched its first three fine wholemeal flours and began selling them online and from markets. For Whitley, the charity was a natural progression from his long career as a baker. He was the first breadmaker to supply genuine sourdough bread to supermarkets – even though he thought it wouldn't sell. However, it 'flew off the shelves' because many people had begun to suffer digestive complaints from mass-produced supermarket bread. Curious about what was causing this reaction, Whitley began to investigate further and was appalled at what was being used to make supermarket bread. 'It's pretty horrifying when you actually see it laid out page after page, all the additives, emulsifiers, fats, crumb-softening enzymes and so on,' he said. He concluded that it wasn't just the additives that were the problem but also the modern varieties of wheat that were being used, which were often less nutritious than the wheat grown in Scotland in the past. Not only that but he found Scottish farmers had been hit by cheap imports so had stopped growing wheat for bread and switched to growing wheat for booze or animal feed instead. 'In the 1990s, when I started getting interested in this, it became obvious that there were significant differences between traditional and modern varieties of wheat in terms of their mineral density and their goodness for eating as food,' said Whitley. 'I wanted to make bread that nourished people, not bread that just filled a supermarket slot. We're all struggling with diet and ill health because our food system has been completely hijacked by money interests. So that's why we started a campaign. 'That's what gets me up in the morning, the feeling that we've gone too far towards a new version of the kind of oppression that began with the emerging capitalist system where people were cleared off the land to work in factories and when the only bread that starvation wages could buy was adulterated with chalk and alum to make it look whiter.' Whitely said it wasn't just human health that was suffering by eating 'rubbish' as the system was also 'trashing' the environment. 'We have to sweat the land to grow vast weights of crops, much of which are wasted at the mill end and by the supermarket system,' he said. 'They travel massive distances and their production causes massive amounts of emissions. 'We have to fight against the system because it's killing us.' Whitley said this was why the charity is working on the concept of 'the People's Bread'. 'It's a bread for everybody that meets the needs of our times,' he said. 'We can do this if we just do it together and get the corporations off our backs. 'I would also add that we should challenge those public servants, for example, in the Scottish Government and Food Standards Scotland, who have responsibilities for health and nutrition. They seem reluctant to stand up to food industry interests. 'Take the so-called 'reformulation project' – removing a little bit of sugar from Irn-Bru, replacing it with artificial sweeteners and calling this a public health gain – you don't have to be a policy guru to realise that's nonsense. 'We could do so much better. So let's start with a really good loaf of bread, ideally made with wholemeal flour and fermented with sourdough, because that keeps everything good in it, rather than substituting the good harvest with rubbish,' said Whitley.
Telegraph
4 days ago
- Telegraph
Ciarán Hinds: ‘A sex symbol? If that's the way you want to put it, OK'
The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan is one of the most viscerally challenging novels ever written about war. Set among a group of Australian POWs who have been forced to work on the construction of the Burma railway in 1942, the Booker Prize winner is unsparing in its depiction of violence, starvation and never-ending toil. A new adaptation, which starts on BBC One on Sunday, is equally graphic, and The Telegraph's critic Tim Robey said that one ' would need superhuman stamina to consider binge-ing it '. Yet perhaps the most devastating moment comes at the end when Ella Evans turns to her husband Dorrigo and tells him: 'You're the loneliest person I've ever met.' It's a damning comment after decades of marriage, but Evans is a man still carrying the weight of guilt and failure from his time commanding the POWs, and is also haunted by a doomed love affair. When asked by a journalist to be interviewed about the Second World War, Evans (now a respected-if-maverick surgeon) shuts down. 'There were people who just saw too much,' says Ciarán Hinds, who plays him. 'They'd been through hell. And you don't want to share hell with anybody, do you?' We are talking over Zoom because Hinds is filming in Dublin. He looks fit and relaxed, with those large, slightly sad eyes still penetrating. His voice is warm and rich, his Belfast accent still resonant. While viewers may find his latest project harrowing, Hinds says it is necessary to show such horrors, 'to try and understand the brutality that humans can inflict on each other, and also the suffering that people go through. All that is part of the same life package to me. It's not about indulgence or grossness, it's elemental.' The young Evans is played by Australian heartthrob Jacob Elordi, best known to UK audiences as the Byronic, indolent aristocrat in Emerald Fennell's Saltburn. Is he flattered by the casting? 'I was quite surprised,' admits Hinds. 'But poor Jacob Elordi. Look what he turns out like! The horror for his future!' Hinds is perhaps being somewhat disingenuous. At 72, he is still considered a sex symbol. 'Oh, if that's the way you want to put it, OK,' he says, waving the comment away. 'Some of my bones feel old, but my spirit feels kind of lively, just let down by the physical attributes. People tell me I look much younger, [that I am] a much younger spirit when I'm on screen.' It was probably the role of Captain Wentworth, smouldering and secretly sensitive, in Roger Michell's 1995 take on Jane Austen 's Persuasion (considered by many Austen fans as the best adaptation of any of her novels) that set the tone. 'I think it was rather short-lived, but you put any guy in a sailor's frock and people's heads will turn, no matter what.' You would imagine that Hinds has been turning heads since arriving in London from Belfast to study at Rada in the early 1970s. 'I arrived with a bit of a chip on my shoulder just because of what was happening over there [during the Troubles]. It was 1973, it was mayhem. I was at university for a few months, ostensibly studying law, but I applied to drama school in London because there weren't any in Northern Ireland, or I might have stayed. Hinds paints me a picture of a young man 'with flared jeans and really long hair, going round in sandals – Irish hippies were always a bit behind the times, what was hitting London in the late 1960s, we were getting in the early 1970s – but there was a look about me that made my friends a bit scared of me. Why? 'They said it was because I came from Belfast. 'You were different, you just had this hair, you're going like, 'Who wants it?'' But I was lucky because they were very open with me, asking seriously about what was going on back home because they knew there were problems, but they didn't really understand them.' Hinds tells me that as he started to grow accustomed to London life, he began to understand the English. 'I saw the goodness in people. And I was hearing about things like divorce, which didn't happen in Ireland – people suffered each other. I was amazed to hear that parents could still be friends despite it. It was a great revelation.' Hinds doesn't live in Northern Ireland. He has a home in London and one in Paris, in the shadow of the Père Lachaise cemetery, which he shares with his French-Vietnamese wife, actress Hélène Patarot (their daughter, Aoife, is also an actress and appears in the Dune: Prophecy series on Sky). His home in the French capital represents relaxation. 'You know when you go home at the end of the day and just want to put the kettle on? That's what I do when I get to Paris. You know, I have a box of Barry's tea bags. I don't do the cafe life that you should do in Paris, but it's because I live there.' Hinds is relaxed and charming company, yet there is still a residual sense of the 1970s firebrand. When we talk about returning to the country of his birth, he does not rule it out, cheered by what he sees as its evolution. 'I see a lot of changes, in both north and south. I go back a couple times a year to see family, and thank God, it's just a lot more open,' he says. 'I mean, there's still too many flags, and there is still the dark underbelly, but at least it's contained.' It is clear that coming of age during the Troubles (he starred in Kenneth Branagh's award-winning Belfast and was nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor) have left their mark on Hinds. Raised as a Catholic, he tells me he was fortunate enough to do dance and drama out of school where there were no religious boundaries. Yet he also had to endure a segregated education system, and today supports the Integrated Education Foundation charity. 'It's so important that you don't separate Catholic and Protestant kids at the age of four and educate them separately, filling them with versions of 'them' and 'us'. I think [integration] has been happening – very slowly – over the last 30 or 40 years, but it'll take generations to really happen. 'A positive move to integrated education doesn't mean to say that you can't have religion.' It's strange to consider that Hinds has been on our screens for half a century. (He thinks so too: 'God, have I? I haven't been counting!') But then his career has been a slow burn, gradually building up credits in the 1980s in high-profile films such as John Boorman's Excalibur, as well as some meaty theatre (notably Peter Brook's celebrated 1987 staging of The Mahabharata). Today, he is one of a small selection of actors who carry weight in big-budget blockbusters (Frozen, Justice League, Game of Thrones) and high-end passion projects such as a Broadway revival of The Crucible opposite Saoirse Ronan and Ben Whishaw. His performances are all, however, marked by a thoughtfulness, his characters always rooted in a psychological reality. Hinds will soon be seen in a new adaptation of John Steinbeck's East Of Eden for Netflix. I wonder if quality roles such as this are getting harder to come by. 'I think there are still roles out there,' he says carefully. 'It depends on how you look at things. 'If you set your sights high about what your pay grade is or who you expect to be working with, that then obviously narrows your choices and closes doors. 'Things have changed since the big corporates have come in, you know, Netflix and Amazon and Apple,' he says, alluding to the amount of money such companies have at their disposal. 'But it's not about the amount of money they need, because usually they can make them on relatively sane budgets, it's about how much you need to tell the story with authenticity and truth, as opposed to what we made with these special effects. Much of the cinematic universe is turning into one big PlayStation.' Hinds does, however, feel optimistic for the future. 'There will always be space for storytellers and great filmmaking. Maybe the adventure is still on.'
