Stuck in Nonfiction in the End Times

“Within the mansion of serious fiction, no one will speak of how the continents were created; nor will they refer to the passage of thousands of years: connections and events on this scale appear not just unlikely but also absurd within the delimited horizon of a novel—”

Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement

So, for a biologist-writer, who reflexively looks to evolution each time she asks herself “why?”—is there a choice? Could I write a novel if my mind tends toward the “serious?” If I cringe and flinch at the very thought that what I care about, what I spend hours, days, or months researching to get each sentence as “right” as I possibly can, might then be read as “science fiction” or as “fantasy”?

Ghosh argues that so little serious fiction has dealt with climate change because any novel attempting to show its consequences automatically gets read or categorized as “fantasy” or “sci fi.” In which case a fiction writer’s choice might be to abandon the most serious issue of our time—or to leavebehind those readers who turn up their noses at genre fiction. Unless, of course, you are Barbara Kingsolver and write something like Flight Behavior. Or unless you are Eiren Caffall, in which case you will simultaneously write a novel (that DOES land you on the “sci fi” shelf, because New York City drowns) and a memoir about climate change in which your body drowning mirrors the environmental catastrophe in which we’ve embroiled our oceans. Caffall explains that she can’t write one without the other, and I wonder if this reflects another quote from Ghosh’s The Great Derangement, namely that “to think about the world only as it is amounts to collective suicide.”

So, if I want my readers to trust me as I think about the millennia that have shaped our bodies, our crop plants, and our immune systems, our culture, our faith, and our art, if I want them to seriously consider how we might yet build a future as our climate hiccups, bounces, and, finally, flips our ecosystems upside-down—then, I am stuck on a shelf in the bookstore that’s labeled “nonfiction”. Which, in the case of my closest chain bookstore, means—in the basement. (Unless, of course, I opt for the kind of “self-help” that promises easy recipes for how to make you feel better. Which does not seem like the way to write about how humans messed up the world.) It also means that, behind that “trust me, I’m not making this up” nonfiction label, I will have to find my way to islands of thinking about the world as it will be or could be, or might have been—fiction territory.

Which reminds me that the escalator to the basement of my closest Barnes & Noble has been out of commission for months, with no indication that it will ever be repaired. And that, of course, in times to come, the basement may yet be the safest place.