Introduction: The Climate Change Shortlist

Early on in Tom Watson’s Metronome, there is a reference to “the melting ice and how it had affected the permafrost, releasing spumes of toxic bacteria” (p. 7). This description assumes a more elegiac form in E. J. Swift’s The Coral Bones: “… the world continued to warm, cruising on three centuries of avarice for fossil fuels, tipping points looming ever closer. There was the west Antarctic ice sheet, the permafrost and its ticking bomb cache of methane, the equatorial regions flipping from carbon sinks to emitters as their rainforests were cut down” (pp. 176-177). In Ned Beauman’s Venomous Lumpsucker, the dominant mode is irony: “she gave him one of her Arctic looks (but the old Arctic, back when there was way more ice).” Irony gives way to resignation in Hervé Le Tellier’s The Anomaly: “We’re prepared to warp reality if the stake is not losing altogether. We want answers for even our tiniest anxieties and a way of conceiving the world without re-examining our values, our emotions, and our actions. Take climate change” (p. 306, emphasis mine). And by the time we get to the terraforming worlds of Lucy Kissick’s Plutoshine, it has become a matter of course: “Nitrogen-ice melts first, then the methane-ice more gradually. Hydrosphere activation is always going to involve a certain amount of planetary … upheaval … but remember we’re talking about a controllable way of wielding crazy amounts of power here” (p. 12).

The 2023 Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist is a climate change shortlist. Climate change—or the climate catastrophe, the Capitolocene—is present either as a background reality or as a dominant theme in five of the six shortlisted novels; the only novel to escape it—Aliette de Bodard’s The Red Scholar’s Wake—does so because it is set in the far-future, and entirely in space. The composition of the shortlist perhaps reflects the fact that while the genre has long been concerned with climate change (back in 2016, Amitav Ghosh, in the typically condescending style of a literary-fiction-marketed author, moaned about how climate change “relegated” a work to the category of science fiction), its treatment of the theme has evolved in scope and sophistication to match the clarity and immediacy of the peril. In 2022 alone, Sequoia Nagamatsu’s How High We Go in The Dark begins with the melting of the permafrost and the release of long-suspended toxins. Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea features climate-change-accelerated evolution of an intelligent octopus species, mirroring some of the preoccupations of Venomous Lumpsucker. Octavia Cade’s ongoing fiction places species extinction—also a theme in more than one of the Clarke 2023 novels—at the forefront. If the 1950s saw a spate of SF written in the shadow of a nuclear catastrophe, then the 2020s seem to be reprising the relationship of urgency between SF and an existential crisis, with climate change replacing nuclear war.

The Irony and the Allegory

In the 2023 Clarke Award shortlist, the two novels that deal most directly with the climate catastrophe are Venomous Lumpsucker and The Coral Bones. Of all the recent climate SF, Venomous Lumpsucker is perhaps the novel that is most representative of the crisis of the “Capitolocene” —that is, the understanding that climate change is embedded within the political economy of global capitalism, and a function of how capitalism’s drive to accumulate impacts ecological systems. A corollary of this is that the climate crisis cannot be “resolved” as long as capitalism remains the mode of organising economic and social relations. Venomous Lumpsucker takes this idea seriously (see this analysis in The London Review of Books): it is, in a sense, the antithesis of Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, eviscerating the belief that incremental changes within the structures of capitalism can lead us into a more hopeful future. In Venomous Lumpsucker, capitalism has fully colonised the fight against climate change and species extinction: “extinction credits” (a riff off pollution credits) can be traded on the market by both corporations and nation-states (arbitrage is rife), “biobanks” exist to retain the data of extinct species in a conscience-cleansing salve for humanity, and the terrifying arbitrariness of individual philanthropy is the only (literal) sanctuary available for a species. What is striking about Venomous Lumpsucker is its unflinching willingness to take the logic of capital, when dealing with the climate crisis, to its ultimate end, and in doing so, to present a vision of the near future that is far grimmer than Kim Stanley Robinson’s blander, more palatable take. This is probably why The Ministry for the Future is on Barack Obama’s shortlist, and Venomous Lumpsucker is on the Clarke Award shortlist.

The Coral Bones replaces Venomous Lumpsucker’s quivering irony (“apocalyptic slapstick,” says the Chicago Review of Books!) with a more elegiac ode to loss. The novel uses the device of three parallel timelines—an HMS Beagle-esque voyage of discovery in the mid-nineteenth century, the ongoing extinction of the coral reef in the present day, and life in a ravaged, nostalgic future—to trace an arc of decay (see Nick Hubble’s analysis of its form). But whether through irony or elegy, both Venomous Lumpsucker and The Coral Bones ask how it is possible to remain human in the teeth of human-caused mass extinction. “How do you grieve for extinction?” (p. 356), The Coral Bones invites us to wonder. “How do you grieve for what is eradicated slowly and inexorably, over the course of a lifetime?” In keeping with their respective visions, Venomous Lumpsucker and The Coral Bones give us different answers. In The Coral Bones, it is collective self-renewal, the possibilities of which are left undetermined at the end; in Venomous Lumpsucker, it is a perennially frustrated desire for self-annihilation, the only possible individual response to a problem that is collectively irresolvable.

The climate crisis is a more peripheral—but unmistakably present—theme in Metronome and Plutoshine. Metronome traces the slow unravelling of the relationship between a husband and a wife who have been exiled to (what is ostensibly) an island, for a period of twelve years, for a crime whose nature becomes more specific as the novel unspools. Metronome is not a novel about the climate crisis in the sense that Venomous Lumpsucker and The Coral Bones are novels about climate crisis, but the climate crisis is vividly present in Metronome’s devastated landscapes, in the daily “pills” that the exiled couple must take, allegedly to counter the effects of the toxins released from the melted permafrost, and indeed, in the nature of the “crime” itself (unauthorised conception in a society that has taken dystopian measures to impose birth control). Thus, if Venomous Lumpsucker and The Coral Bones open up windows into the unfolding of the climate crisis, Metronome paints us the aftermath, seen up close and granularly, through an individual lens: a physically ravaged world, a rent social fabric, and a regression in all senses. Indeed, one incidental—but interesting—overlap between Metronome and Venomous Lumpsucker is a very similar prognosis of the descent of Britain into a closed, authoritarian society. While Britain isn’t mentioned by name, Venomous Lumpsucker’s references to “the Hermit Kingdom” leave one with little doubt about that nation’s post-Brexit trajectory, and Metronome’s own coded references to contemporary political events are unmistakable in their own way.

If Metronome is granular, then Plutoshine takes us to the more expansive vistas of classic SF: of terraforming worlds, using the Archimedes principle to bring the sun to ice-bound planets, and First Contact. In Plutoshine, the urgent crisis of Venomous Lumpsucker, The Coral Bones, and Metronome, takes the form of echoes from a not-so-distant past: a past in which “solar mirrors” (p. 137) are introduced to earth in order to enable all-year-round farming, and then exported to Mars with disastrous consequences. The freight of this past weighs heavily upon the novel’s present: an ambitious attempt to terraform Pluto through asteroid-sized solar mirrors. The project’s greatest peril is not the limits of technology, but a first principles debate over the ethics of terraforming itself. Here again, one feels that any novel dealing with such themes is almost compelled to respond to Kim Stanley Robinson. As the arguments against terraforming are summed up:

Native life kept popping out of the ground in unexpected places, with surely more jump-scares to come. Terraforming also went wrong sometimes, and quite horribly so when it did. And did we have the right to mould a world to our will? What if in ten years, fifty years—like the old anthropologists, picking up fallen henges, blundering all chance of true reconstruction—we realised we had made irreparable errors? Or—and Clavius Harbour himself even used to point this one out before switching sides—what if we were wasting our energy, our potential, renovating worlds never meant for us? What if we were too preoccupied with recreating parent Earth underfoot to remember the waiting stars overhead? (pp. 219-220)

Many of these arguments are, of course, familiar today, especially the last one, which is often articulated in response to some of the wilder proposals that come out of Silicon Valley. Plutoshine uses the device of First Contact to avoid a decisive answer to these questions (one senses that any attempt at a decisive answer would be unsatisfactory), but the raising of the questions, and the manner in which they are embedded into the story, itself serves as a rebuke to more optimistic retellings of the future, where the solution to the climate crisis lies in bending other worlds to human will. In a neat reversal of an old trope, one feels quite ambivalent when, early on in the book, one of the terraformers is described thus:

Solar mirrors were old hat to the great terraformer Halley. This was the woman who grew oceans, tamed volcanoes, resurrected worlds. She captured comets, crushing them into atmospheres; she generated external magnetic fields, bringing the aurora back to Mars; she had the forces of nature wrapped around her finger. (p. 41)

At first blush, Hervé le Tellier’s The Anomaly is not a story about the climate crisis. It belongs to the tradition of thought-experiment SF, where you imagine one alteration to our world, and ask “what if?” As a flight signals its approach into an airport, it is discovered that it—and everyone on board—is an exact copy of a flight, flying the same route, that had landed three months ago. The internal time clock of those on board remains unchanged. Thus, for a select group of individuals in the world, there now exist two “sets” of the same person—only, one with a three-month time lag. The Anomaly explores how the State might respond, how society might respond—and, most strikingly—how the individuals might themselves respond. “People rarely have the opportunity to save a relationship before it’s even in danger,” writes one of the characters—in one of the most moving passages of the book—having seen, in the three-month lag, that his partner has left him. “I want to have a second chance before I ruin the first one” (p. 317).

But while at one level, The Anomaly plays with our ideas of time and personal identity, at another level, it’s more than just an elegant SF thought experiment. Midway through the book, it becomes clear that the only explanation for “the anomaly” is that the world (and all of us) is a simulation run by a highly intelligent civilisation that escaped technological self-destruction (that other old SF chestnut!). The twist, however, is that the apparent purpose of “the anomaly” is to see how the human race will respond to this existential wrinkle—and, if they fail to respond in the right way (or at least, an interesting way) then the intelligence running the simulation may decide to shut it down (p. 168).

The Anomaly thus transforms into a story about the possibilities of collective action: a test set by God. Humanity’s flailing response to the test highlights, in turn, our failure—or perhaps, our unwillingness—to take that collective action, even in the teeth of a visible, tangible existential crisis. It is here that the The Anomaly turns into a near-allegory of the climate crisis (there are obvious similarities with Don’t Look Up), a point driven home by Le Tellier on more than one occasion: through reference to elite attempts to secede from the climate crisis early in the book (p. 85), and through the direct invocation—“take climate change” (p. 306)—when referring to humanity’s preference to “warp reality” in order to maintain its fragile, collective confirmation bias.

Taken together, then, these five novels constitute a kaleidoscope of perspectives on the climate crisis: the Capitolocene critique in Venomous Lumpsucker, the threnody of extinction in The Coral Bones, the context of devastation in Metronome, the baggage of history in Plutoshine, and the obliqueness of allegory in The Anomaly. Thematic threads bind these novels together as well: background political authoritarianism in Venomous Lumpsucker and Metronome, the trauma of species extinction in Venomous Lumpsucker and The Coral Bones, the gaze of the future in The Coral Bones and Plutoshine, and a pessimism about the possibility of collective action in The Anomaly, Metronome, and Venomous Lumpsucker.

Fantasies of Power and Illusions of Choice

Now enter The Red Scholar’s Wake, a novel emphatically not about the climate crisis. The Red Scholar’s Wake is a return to Aliette de Bodard’s Xuya universe, and for those familiar with her work, a return to familiar terrain: a terrain of sentient spaceships, intimacy conditioned and constrained by unequal power relationships, and the ever-present strains between core and periphery in the context of empire. The Red Scholar’s Wake is inspired by  historical events around piracy off the Chinese coast and places it in the interstellar setting of the Xuya universe. Rice Fish—a sentient spaceship—must get over the death of a spouse, discover how they were murdered with the help of a new partner, all the while holding together a fragile pirate coalition under pressure both from within, from both internal and external forces.

At one level, it might seem that The Red Scholar’s Wake is the Clarke Award’s reaffirmation that there is good SF being written that is not about climate change. But there is also a way in which The Red Scholar’s Wake is the most striking illustration of another thematic unity that binds together the six books on the Clarke Award shortlist: in one way of another, each of these novels engage with the evolution, distortion, decay, or dissolution of human (or non-human) relationships under contexts of extreme pressure.

The Red Scholar’s Wake explores the relationship between Rice Fish and Xich Si; when the story opens, Xich Si has recently been captured by the pirates, and Rice Fish’s spouse, the Red Scholar, has just been killed in battle. Rice Fish offers to Xich Si a choice—that is no choice at all—of escaping prisoner status by becoming her wife, and using her technological expertise to uncover who—within the pirate ranks—was responsible for the betrayal and death of the Red Scholar. As she has done before—in stories such as Fireheart Tiger—Aliette de Bodard engaged with the texture of this (initially) highly unequal relationship to explore larger questions around political and other forms of power. The relationship between Rice Fish and Xich Si is also the anvil upon which the other relationships in the book—between Xich Si and her child, Rice Fish and her adult son, Rice Fish and her deceased spouse—take their shape. By the end of the story, these relationships become crucial determinants in how the larger, interstellar conflict plays out.

Taking a look at the rest of the Clarke shortlist—now in reverse order—we can see similar dynamics at play. For instance, The Anomaly is written in the form of vignettes, interviews, and letters: after news of the anomaly is made public, each episode in the book deals—at the granular level—with how one individual, a set of individuals, or a family, deals with the existence of a carbon copy that has lived three months more (or less). Relationships are subjected to the most intense stress test imaginable: some fade, some disintegrate, and some re-form.

In Plutoshine, the crisis on Pluto is mediated by the tangled relationship between the Harbour family: between Clavius Harbour, genius scientist and one-time head of the Pluto mission, but now rendered vegetative after a mysterious accident on Pluto, involving the entire family; Edmund Harbour, his taciturn son, also a scientist; and the ten-year old Nou Harbour, his daughter, who has been traumatised into silence ever since the accident. Many of the events in Plutoshine, in turn, deal with the terraformer Lucian’s attempts to get Nou to communicate; and one feels throughout that the key to the crisis lies in the success of those efforts, and the resolution of what really happened between the family on the day of the accident.

Metronome could almost be called Lord of the Flies with adults: the narrative driver of the story is the discovery that even after the twelve-year sentence of exile is over, nobody appears to be coming to relieve Aina and Whitney from the island, and that they might be stuck there forever, without their son; indeed, the external world itself might have collapsed during their exile. Aina and Whitney’s radically different reactions to this realisation (see Nina Allan’s review) set them on an inevitable—and destructive—collision course, even as everything else falls apart around them.

In The Coral Bones—almost in the style of The Aeneid—breakdown in an intimate relationship seems to mirror the breakdown of ecosystems and the destruction of worlds; and just as the possibility of collective renewal is left undetermined, the possibility of personal renewal ends on a tantalisingly incomplete note, leaving the reader to determine for themselves what ending they want—or, what ending they could not bear.

And finally, while relationships are not the focus of Venomous Lumpsucker, individual breakdown under conditions of extreme pressure is: in this case, Karin Resaint’s drive for self-annihilation at the hands of the venomous lumpsuckers as an act of atonement for human-induced mass extinction.

As with the larger theme of climate change, there are thematic overlaps: fraught parent-child relationships in The Red Scholar’s Wake and Plutoshine, intimate partner abuse and power imbalances in The Red Scholar’s Wake and Metronome, disintegration and renewal of intimate relationships in The Anomaly and The Coral Bones, explorations of personal trauma and its physiological manifestation in Venomous Lumpsucker and Plutoshine, and the striving for meaningful choice in a choiceless context in The Red Scholar’s Wake and Metronome. What, in essence, unites these books is that each of them pay as much attention—and as much painstaking detail—to what Teju Cole calls the “incontestable fundamentals of a person: pleasure, sorrow, love, humor, and grief, and the complexity of the interior landscape that sustains those feelings.”

Conclusion

As always, the Clarke shortlist has generated excellent structural and substantive analysis. As in previous years (2017 and 2022), in this review essay, my attempt has been to add to this conversation by taking a thematic perspective, by examining unifying and overlapping elements underlying shortlist, and by asking what (if anything) this might tell us about the present direction of the genre, and how it relates to our world. In my reading, the 2023 shortlist—more directly and more starkly than in other years—gestures towards the relationship between science fiction and crisis. As I have argued above, this is perhaps the first time since the 1950s that there is a sense of one, overarching crisis that the genre is uniquely positioned to respond to; and the selection in the Clarke shortlist reflects that sense. Crises at scale, however, transform and reconstitute ways of being, including (and in particular) how we relate to each other. It is perhaps natural, therefore, that the second theme that unites the Clarke shortlist is an exploration of the reshaping, re-forming, or de-forming of human relationships (individual and social) in states of exception. Taken together, this collection of novels takes us from the granular to the cosmic, from terraformed planets and species extinction to—in the words of Brian Friel—“interpreting between privacies.” Even as it coalesces around a specific theme, it is thus, therefore, a fitting tribute to the richness and capacity of science fiction.