Maybe you *can* write a climate novel about a house?
Thoughts on Cory Doctorow's THE LOST CAUSE
In The Great Derangement, Amitov Ghosh’s 2016 nonfiction treatise on the difficulties of thinking and writing about climate change, the author describes how the modern realist novel turned away from detailing extraordinary events, like those that made up the epics of old, to explore ordinary moments of bourgeois life. Global upheavals and the grand march of history receded into the background, as novels narrowed their scope to a particular time and place, to the “individual moral adventure” (Updike’s phrase), and to interpersonal dramas that could fit inside a small town or a drafty manor house.
This was one of the three key reasons Ghosh cited for literature’s failure (circa 2016) to grapple with the implications of the climate crisis and the Anthropocene (the other two being our comfortable reliance in the Global North on capitalism and empire). Of course he largely leaves out speculative fiction, where environmental collapse had been showing up in books for decades. This earned him few friends in the SFF community. Nonetheless, I find the book useful, particularly this articulation of the disconnect between our most popular literary tool——the novel, finely honed to tell stories the size of a house——and the unprecedented, planetary-scale events now unfolding.
How can the novel contain not just the house but the flood that washes the house away, the storm that caused the flood, the heat in the atmosphere that amplified that storm to thousand-year proportions, the greenhouse gasses that trapped that heat, the millions of machines that put those gasses into the air, and the treaties and legislation that are trying to make it cheaper to turn those machines off?
Climate fiction authors, some of them directly heeding Ghosh’s call to break out of the old forms, have been tackling this problem in a few different ways. There’s the ecosystem novel that keeps the focus on nature, like Richard Powers The Overstory. There’s the fantasy allegory, like N K Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy. There’s what
calls the speculative epic, braiding together past, present and future into one book, like ’s Appleseed. There’s the geoengineering thriller, like Neal Stephenson’s Termination Shock. There’s the solistalgic literary meditation, like Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior. There’s the planetary kaleidoscope novel, like Stan Robinson’s Ministry for the Future, in which “individual moral adventures” are squeezed in between scenes depicting diverse human experience and collective action. My own climate book tossed out the singular narrative to try to capture the planetary possibilities with five diverging variations on the same disaster story. We really are in a renaissance of form.But what’s to become of the house-sized novel? Will climate collapse drive it to extinction, like so many other species that came of age in the last millennium? Or will it learn to adapt?
Over the Thanksgiving holiday, I devoured Cory Doctorow’s new book The Lost Cause, described on the cover as “a novel of truth and reconciliation in our polarized future.” Cory is a really smart guy, a public intellectual as well as a sci-fi writer, and I make it a point to try to read most of the fiction he puts out. Though I may have once complained in a zine that his book Radicalized was insufficiently Marxist (Bernie vs. Warren fights were a hell of a drug), in recent years I’ve felt our politics converge. So I’ve been stoked for The Lost Cause ever since he first posted an excerpt of it some years ago (I think in 2019?).
(Mild spoilers ahead.)
The Lost Cause takes place some decades from now and follows 19-year-old Brooks, a member of “the first generation not to fear the future.” Brooks is politically engaged and eager to join the “Blue Helmets” climate corps, part of the Green New Deal that has given America a fighting chance to decarbonize and survive the polycrisis. Brooks’ was orphaned by a novel virus at a young age, and so he was sent to Burbank, CA to live with his elderly, abusive, reactionary grandfather. Despite the success and popularity of the GND’s much overdue reforms——a Jobs Guarantee, gun control, Medicare for All, etc.——Gramps and his “Maga Club” friends hate it. They especially hate the prospect of Burbank taking in some of the climate refugees retreating from rising seas, wildfires, and dustbowl towns. Things escalate when Gramps dies and Brooks inherits his century-old single-family house.
Finally free of Gramps, Brooks gets roommates and then takes in folks from a caravan fleeing the ruined Central Valley. He dreams of knocking down the house to build an apartment building, part of a movement to remake Burbank to be denser, transit-focused, and futureproof. Eventually, despite plutocrat-funded legal injunctions and choking smoke disasters, they do just that, flaunting the agonizingly slow planning process to build what needs to be built and put roofs over heads.
Meanwhile the Maga Clubs grow increasingly furious and violent, turning to cross burning, bombings, and other kinds of terrorism to express their displeasure with the state, city, and Brooks in particular. This is the eponymous “lost cause,” and much of the book is devoted to picking apart the futile, irrational, hateful ideology/psychology that motivates them. These are the fanatical forces that brought us Trump and Bolsonaro, and that continue to (off and on) seize fresh power in places like Argentina and the Netherlands. Brooks’ struggle with them for the future is one that’s too often missing from the burgeoning genre of new utopian literature.
There’re lots of elements of this book to appreciate. I love the focus on work: not on the drudgery and alienation of being a wage slave to capital, but the joy of real, socially valuable work helping others and building a better world. Under the Jobs Guarantee, Brooks can simply wake up and, if he feels like it, log onto the city job board to make some money doing elder care or construction or disaster relief. I’d love to be able to do this, and I think it would be a transformative option for millions of people for whom “employment” is an eternally precarious, anxiety-ridden condition.
Instead of working office 9-to-5s, the protagonists in this novel are constantly leaping into action when there’s a flood or humanitarian crisis, networking with global experts to deploy prefabbed construction materials, moving fast and building things. Doctorow is great at capturing both the minutiae of engaging productively with material reality and the sense of satisfaction and flow that comes with doing something interesting and useful. And when their labors are done, usually they’re rewarded with gratitude, camaraderie, and solidarity——not to mention food and drink and celebration.
That’s another thing I loved about this book, how often it dwells on the pleasures of cooking and sharing meals with friends, of making one’s own whiskey or ginger beer, of throwing big parties and generally being social in person rather than fixated on screens and feeds and content. Like a lot of solarpunk, Doctorow does a lovely job of glamorizing a pivot away from the abstractions of cyberspace and back to what’s compelling about material reality. The coolest, hippest, sexiest figures in this future are the Blue Helmets: dashing young people who join up to rebuild whole cities in weeks, and then come home with epic war stories and globe-trotting swagger.
For all this expansive sense of possibility, though, I do think this is kind of a story the size of a house. Nearly the entire book takes places within biking distance of Brook’s home, and the fate of the house is what motivates both Brooks and some of the individual Magas we get to know. And as much as this book is about collective action and the impacts of world-historical environmental and political upheavals, the book’s tight first person perspective manages to also make it feel like an “individual moral adventure.”
I think a big reason why the centrality of this house-cum-construction-site works is because The Lost Cause is about housing.
By the mid-2040s when the book takes place, decarbonization seems mostly accomplished. The social and economic reforms of the Green New Deal, though embattled, don’t seem to be going anywhere. What’s left to decide and wrestle over is where we’re going to put all the people who will lose their homes to climate catastrophe, and how we change the ways we live and build so these losses don’t happen everywhere.
This I think is quite a smart place to put the focus. For one, housing changes really slowly. As anyone who has spent time debating California’s present day housing crisis knows, it can take 30 years for a development to get planned, approved, built, occupied, and to bring down prices. And zoning policy and city planning is very much a local issue in America where ideology struggles to find purchase——NIMBYism is defined by the hypocrisy of thinking sure, something should be done, just not near where I live. Even if one wins a federal bill, implementing it will require thousands of little, municipal-level fights.
Questions of who gets to live where are some of the thorniest in all of politics. Many (not all) people get attached to places. Either they chose to live in a place because it had certain qualities, or they’re just used to things being a certain way. They feel confused or dismayed when their community changes. Some fret a great deal about the prospect of strangers moving in next to them, of altering the “character of the neighborhood,” of finding themselves outnumbered by those they don’t know.
The open question is whether a) this is a rational response to the economic pressures that mass migration often brings——more competition for jobs, rising housing costs, etc. Or b) this is the result of tribalism, racism, xenophobia, the conservative urge to maintain “an in-group that the law protects but does not bind and an out-group that the law binds but does not protect”——or just a deep-seated sense that one should get choose one’s neighbors and exclude those newcomers who don’t seem like the right sort. It’s a classic question of materialism vs. idealism.
In a recent episode of the Ones and Tooze podcast,
argued that the sensible response to this (speaking in particular about the rise of the German far right) is to make the kinds of public investment that can alleviate the economic anxiety brought by mass migration. Make sure cost of living stays low, jobs and housing stay plentiful, etc. We don’t know that this will help people turn away from the far right, but certainly we can’t expect to change people’s hearts and minds without addressing those concerns.The hope that socialists/Marxists/left-materialists have is that, freed from the burden of competition, most people will be more welcoming of newcomers, will see the humanity in the Other and treat each other better. But maybe that’s a slow-unfolding evolution of human nature, or maybe there will just always be a cohort of people who can’t stand change and difference.
Either way, in the near term, any project that hopes to house and resettle the hundreds of millions that will be displaced by the climate crisis will have to grapple with far right freaks who’d rather see mass death and slaughter than mass migration.
This grappling is what The Lost Cause is about. The Magas are mostly old, semi-feeble cranks, brains twisted by bad media and free floating resentment and other cranks egging them on. But they are willing to threaten and at times deploy violence to keep Brookes from bringing new people into the neighborhood.
In this way The Lost Cause crystalizes the swirl of primordial forces we’ve unleashed upon the planet into questions of who gets to live or die, which in turn narrow into politics, then into policy, then into planning, and finally into what is to be done with this one drafty house.
Despite the tagline on the cover, by the end of the novel a lot of truth has been dispensed, but not much reconciliation has been won. Which is sad, because I think Doctorow earnestly set himself to the task of reckoning with the problem of “our polarized future.” But, frankly, it’s hard to imagine how de-polarization would go. I’m not sure I could have done better.
In lieu of changing hearts and minds, the heroes of The Lost Cause rally. Over and over they lose ground they’d worked hard to gain, the roadblocks get bigger, their enemies get more determined and ruthless, the weather gets heavier and heavier. But after a week or a day or an hour of feeling like shit they relight the fire under their asses and get back to work.
That’s the lesson of the book, I think: we can’t make these people go away, just like we can’t make climate change go away, so we just have to keep fighting, organizing, building, dreaming because there’s no other way forward. This was a potent message to read, for me, as I’ve been pretty politically demoralized ever since the Bernie campaign ended and covid began, all in the same month. I was still knocking doors when the first social distancing measures were coming down. I remember putting up posts urging friends to vote, and then taking them down 24 hours later because suddenly I couldn’t in good conscience ask people to leave their homes.
The novel’s ending is similarly abrupt, and tragic, thanks to another species of black swan killer air. But turns out that’s true to 21st century life, too. Mother Nature always gets the last, angry word.
The Lost Cause is the kind of cli-fi book I’ve been waiting for (and struggled to figure out how to write): one that doesn’t shy away from the scale and tenor of the challenges we face, that contains the ideas we need to build a better world, and that still, despite the planetary scope of its subject, feels like a novel. All of which is to say, maybe one can write a climate novel about a house?
As a coda, I’d like to mention a metaphor that Doctorow is fond of deploying when talking about the climate crisis: that of a bus headed toward a deadly cliff, with a driver asleep at the wheel, and the rich people at the front willfully oblivious because they aren’t used to bad things happening to them. Cory says, transit etiquette be damned, those of us in the back need to fight our way to the front and grab the wheel before it’s too late.
I certainly agree. However, I’d amend the metaphor slightly. We aren’t heading for a cliff, we’re driving into a wildfire inferno, the flames already licking at our tires. Yes, we need to slam the brakes and swerve, but we also need to turn the bus around and get to cooler, safer ground. Which is my pitch to keep the necessity of climate repair in mind. The fight must be bigger than decarbonization, bigger than adaptation. A multigenerational project to not just survive but clean up our mess, so that one day we might really have a generation that doesn’t fear the future.
Take My Clarion West Class in March!
Well, if you liked all that and want to go deeper with me on climate fiction and solarpunk, I’m excited to announce that I’ll be teaching a class on just that! The class, part of the Clarion West online workshop series, will run three Saturdays in March, the 16th, 23rd and 30th, from 01:00 PM - 02:30 PM PT.
The course will be a combination lecture and workshop, with the express goal of helping participants craft great climate fiction/solarpunk stories to submit to venues like the Grist Imagine 2200 climate fiction contest. I was one of three reviewers on the first iteration of that contest in 2021, reviewing hundreds of entries. I also co-wrote the winning story for the Imagination and Climate Futures Initiative’s 2016 climate fiction contest. So this is a niche I have a lot of experience in!
The plan is to give participants a crash course in cli-fi and solarpunk as genres, dig into thorny questions about climate science/politics/policy/tech, brainstorm about what kind of future we might build over the coming climate-wracked century, and give feedback on story ideas or starts.
Check out the details and register here!
2023 Award Eligibility
It’s that time of year! If you participate in any of the SFF awards (i.e. the Hugo, Nebula, or Locus), I would be honored if you would consider supporting my short fiction. I had three stories published this year:
“Any Percent” — Giganotosaurus. (Give it a like on the Nebula Reading List.) A gritty cyberprole drama about speedrunning and solidarity in a video game where you can live any human life.
“The Uncool Hunters” — Escape Pod podcast. (Nebula Reading List link.) A fun, ‘high capitalist‘ comedy caper about two creative consultants duking it out in an Illinois Costco.
“Family Business” (with Corey J. White) — Analog Magazine. (NRL)
A multigenerational dramedy set in the climate repair industry—featuring carbon offset scams, ancestor AIs, and striking dolphins.
Thank you for your consideration. You can find excerpts (and a handy graphic I ran out of room to include in this email) on my website here.
On the Socials
I think, in the process of sharing the above graphic, I’ve found my way onto all the various distributed twitters we now must navigate. Feel free to follow me on you preferred platforms to catch my professional updates and occasional posts: Bluesky, Threads, Instagram, Twitter, Mastodon, LinkedIn.
Recommendations + Fellow Travelers
Brad Johnson of the Hill Heat newsletter was kind enough to recommend my climate novel as a primer for those uninitiated trying to wrap their heads around the now-ongoing COP28 negotiations. Hill Heat is one of the best ways to follow inside climate baseball, especially the American politics of our burning planet. Incidentally, my book is currently 25% off with free shipping (promo code SNOW23-FI) if you order from the publisher.
A.E. Marling——SFF author and notorious projection activist——is self-publishing a short solarpunk mystery novel, Murder in the Tool Library, which comes out as an ebook this coming Friday. I know Alan from way back in the Bay Area Magic: The Gathering scene, and it’s great to see him out there causing trouble and writing books. Plus, “crime in paradise” is one of my favorite solarpunk microgenres. So throw him a $3 preorder!
Patrick Tanguay, curator of the excellent
newsletter, shared my ‘Space Is Dead’ essay from last month. Patrick lightly pushed back, suggesting that I may be overindexing, and pointed to Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota series as an example of SF that does what I suggest. Despite having some very weird stuff going on, I agree that these don’t fall into the space-trap (until the fourth book, maybe?——I haven’t finished them), and instead imagine radical social and political change right here on a futuristic earth. Still, my point is less that one can’t find serious earthly SF (see the above essay). It’s that a lot of speculative brainpower is being devoted to gaming out a trajectory we abandoned half a century ago. Anyhow, I thank Patrick for the dialogue, and you should definitely follow Sentiers!Kelly Porter is an artist I met years ago when I found myself hypnotically compelled to buy a painting hanging in a Berkeley cava bar. Kelly has a new Insta I spotted recently, including posting this painting titled “The Beast in the Thaw", which is loosely inspired by an (unpublished) novella I wrote. Anyway, follow him!
‘The Beast in the Thaw’ by Kelly Porter
If you like the this newsletter, consider subscribing or checking out my recent climate fiction novel Our Shared Storm, which Publisher’s Weekly called “deeply affecting” and “a thoughtful, rigorous exploration of climate action.” This month it’s 25% off with free shipping (promo code SNOW23-FI) if you order from the publisher.