Death by Landscape by Elvia Wilk
(Soft Skull Press, 2022)
Reviewed by Niall Harrison
In 1998, Jonathan Lethem published an essay, ‘The Squandered Promise of Science Fiction’, which imagined that Gravity’s Rainbow won the 1973 Nebula Award and that subsequently, as a positive consequence, both the term ‘science fiction’ and the separate science fiction community gradually withered away. The essay was knowingly provocative, albeit with a sincere desire behind it for a less territorial literary ecology. It came to mind while reading Elvia Wilk’s essay collection because Lethem has lavishly blurbed it, and because I suspect part of the reason he did is Wilk’s total comfort in segueing from Margaret Atwood to Kathe Koja to Daisy Hildyard to Tricia Sullivan, or between solarpunk and 19th-century poetry and vampire LARPing. Death by Landscape is a lively, wide-ranging demonstration of how far and how fast the borders have fallen: the back cover even describes the contents as ‘fan non-fiction’.
What the collection is actually about is environmental and ecosystems fiction, particularly its weird and uncanny variants, and as such it can be shelved honourably alongside books like Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement (2016) or Mark Bould’s The Anthropocene Unconscious (2021) as an attempt to understand how culture is responding to the climate crisis. Wilk is more wide-ranging than Ghosh and more incisive than Bould, and ultimately, also more informal (and indeed more fannish) than either, as in the latter stages the essays become somewhat more personal, and consider Wilk’s processes for her own fiction, notably her near-future novel Oval (2019, but published for the first time in the UK this year by Peninsula Press), as well as her situation during lockdown. But I was most struck by how the way Wilk thinks and writes about the environment cuts across the literary landscape as we currently understand it and starts to generate its own sense of community. It’s a commonplace experience, these days, to find an individual trope, like time travel or the multiverse, becoming part of our general culture, but this is something more: the way Wilk groups the works she discusses is simply a different way of organising information, like choosing to divide the spectrum of visible light into different slices than the rainbow we typically use.
It’s a perspective that does lead to some idiosyncratic history. Take this, for instance: ‘Although it was likely around for some time before, in the mid-2000s, the term new weird entered circulation as a way of describing contemporary fiction that takes up old weird concerns with a new ecological awareness in mind.’ I'm not so foolish as to suggest that there is any possible ‘correct’ definition of the new weird, but it seems that for Wilk its central figures are Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, and its central text their 2008 anthology The New Weird, which I do think it's reasonable to describe as an incomplete understanding. But it doesn’t invalidate other aspects of her analysis. Ecological awareness may or may not be a central characteristic of the new weird, but Wilk finds plenty of examples of weird ecology to discuss, and is interesting on their relationship to more conventional science fiction and fantasy. She recognises (I think correctly) that both are ‘literal storytelling: the deviations within them are to be taken as fact’; she then argues that the weird is most powerful not when it combines or blurs fantasy and science fiction modes, but when it disallows interpretation entirely, and when readers recognise that fact, complete with colourful metaphors: ‘Interpretive digging,’ she writes, ‘is like jealousy. It’s like digging through your girlfriend’s emails trying to find evidence of love.’
When it comes to solarpunk, Wilk builds an equivalent of the aesthetics-is-politics critique more commonly associated with steampunk (‘sustainable technology that looks good does not, in itself, promise anything better’), and is dismissive of what she sees as the top-down ‘solutionism’ of writers like Neal Stephenson and his co-conspirators in the Hieroglyph project. But she also finds potential in the overt self-consciousness of the term, suggesting that where for cyberpunk the act of naming was an act of assimilation, by creating the name first, solarpunk is an attempt ‘to seize the genre category and steer it before any dissident influence could be assimilated’. I don't think there is much evidence that this is actually happening in practice—although Becky Chambers did just win a Hugo for a novella described as solarpunk in its publicity material—but Wilk’s essay did make me think again about a movement that I had largely dismissed. Maybe there is some there after all.
And even if not with solarpunk per se, could something similar be happening with environmental/ecosystems/climate fiction more broadly? I’m not suggesting that ‘science fiction’ is actually about to fall out of use; as noted above, Wilk is quite comfortable using the term (at one point she talks about returning to ‘my regular reading, mediaeval mysticism and science fiction’) and throughout the book she demonstrates a convincing and enjoyable breadth of reference. But there does seem to be a gap opening up between mainstream and genre communities in their attitudes to this sort of work. The very existence of Death by Landscape, in addition to, say, Richard Powers’ Pulitzer for The Overstory, demonstrates mainstream interest in the topic; and while genre communities are more willing to recognise work by mainstream writers than they were when Lethem wrote his essay—Thomas Pynchon may not have a Nebula, but Michael Chabon does—they seem to me to be awfully reluctant, Chambers notwithstanding, to recognise environmentally-themed work from anywhere. Maybe reading green too often feels like eating greens. But in both her theory and her practice (Oval is good, too), I think Elvia Wilk might help to change a few minds on that front.
Review from BSFA Review 19 - Download your copy here.