Disgrace

by J.M. Coetzee

In Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee, a celebrated Noble Prize laureate, who is also known for his outspoken
defence of animal rights, interweaves a brutal dog-killing scene with the gang-rape of a white South
African woman by three black men.

Praised as one of the South African postcolonial canons, the novel explores complex issues of white
supremacy and anticolonial resistance as well as racial and gender violence. It ties these issues with
humans’ domination and exploitation of the animals and further challenges our ethical position.

The combination of these two acts – the killing of dogs and the rape of a woman – can be read as
Coetzee’s ecocritique of the colonial violence against nonhuman beings and the natural
environment.

Ecocriticism 101 Reading List

By Nancy Aravecz, Mid-Manhattan Library
October 28, 2014

In recent years, the environment has moved from a marginal concern to the average
American citizen to a major political, personal, and philosophical issue that pervades
everyday life. In response to rising concerns (and sea levels), a tremendous
outpouring of fiction, nonfiction, movies, and music that tackle the issue both directly
and indirectly have infiltrated our daily rosters of cultural consumption. Though the
environment factors heavily in literature and entertainment throughout the ages
(think idyllic pastoral sonnets from the Renaissance era, or Hollywood’s Spaghetti
Western movies from the ‘50s and ‘60s—and everything in between), more than ever
before, the environment and our relationship to it are present in contemporary
cultural production, as words like “green” and “sustainable” become increasingly
prevalent in our vocabularies.

So how do we make sense of it all? Since the 1980s, in light of growing

environmental consciousness and concern across the world, the term ecocriticism
has emerged, eventually growing into a critical discipline in its own right. Ecocriticism
seeks to answer questions like: What are the ethics of human interaction with the
environment? What do we mean when we use the word “nature”? What does our
cultural output say about our perception of the world we live in? And, how can we re-
think and re-engage with the environment to affect positive change for the future? If
you’re looking to explore ecocriticism, any of the following books are a good place to
start:


 The Future of Environmental Criticism by Lawrence
Buell

American professor and scholar Lawrence Buell is widely recognized as a

major pioneer of ecocriticism. In The Future of Environmental Criticism, he
traces the emergence of the discipline, tracks its progress, and predicts its
future. Most importantly, he lays out the reasons why environmental criticism
is a vital edition to academic discourse worldwide in light of climate change
and outlines ways in which it can be modified to create a popular
consciousness and debate about ecology and encourage the lifestyle
changes necessary to guarantee humankind’s future on Earth.

Walden, or Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau

It’s no coincidence that ecocriticism emerged first and foremost, as an

American critical tradition. With a national literature brimming with testimonials
of challenging, diverse, and rolling landscapes, and with personal and
philosophical accounts of rugged individualism in the face of such fierce
countryside, it makes sense that nature factors heavily into the American
literary imagination. A classic work of American romanticism and the
transcendentalist movement, Thoreau’s Walden is an essential read for the
budding ecocritic. Seeking solitude, self-sufficiency, and harmony in the
woods of Concord, Massachusetts, Thoreau meticulously recorded his
experience and the philosophical implications of his quest to find a more
meaningful existence in the world. The result is a book that is widely
considered to be the very foundation of the American environmentalist
movement.

Ecology Without Nature by Timothy Morton

 An essential text in ecological thinking, Ecology Without Nature is an
excellent and accessible introduction to common ideas in contemporary
ecocriticism. Timothy Morton argues that the chief stumbling block toward
sustainable human interaction with the environment lies in our fundamental
perception of it as capital-N “Nature.” He theorizes that ecological writers’
“very zeal to preserve the natural world leads them away from the ‘nature’
they revere.” Morton sets out a seeming paradox: to have a properly
ecological view of the world, we must relinquish the idea of nature for once
and for all.

Politics of Nature by Bruno Latour

One of the world’s leading contemporary philosophers and sociologists of

science, Bruno Latour frequently treats the topic of the environment and our
understanding of it in his works. Politics of Nature seeks to shed light on the
ways in which politics has warped popular perception of the environment and
its current issues (and, in a broader sense, most scientific concerns), and to
think about new ways of democratizing scientific knowledge on the
environment so as to arrive at practical and accessible solutions to problems
like climate change.

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson

Often credited with inspiring key thinkers in the deep ecology and ecofeminist
movements, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring is directly responsible for
mobilizing grassroots environmental activists and the United States
government alike. Written on the topic of the use of harmful pesticides in the
American agricultural industry, Carson’s painstakingly researched book uses
beautiful prose to call its readers to begin to question not only the way that the
environment is unthinkingly altered by human actions, but also to the broad
ripple effect our industries can have on the ecosystem.


 The Comedy of Survival by Joseph W. Meeker

Here, Joseph Meeker lays out his theory that comedy and tragedy are forms
of adaptive behavior in the natural world that either promote our survival
(comedy) or estrange us from other life forms (tragedy). Drawing upon
centuries of western writing from Shakespeare to E. O. Wilson, he
demonstrates the universality of comedy in both human and animal behavior
and shows how the comic mode helps us to live in harmony with nature.
Meeker then defines the tragic view of life, interweaving that behavior with
exploitation of the environment. The Comedy of Survival is a book for literary
critics, environmentalists, human ecologists, philosophers, and
anthropologists. General readers, too, will find much to ponder in the author's
clear explanation of how all of us might become better stewards of our home,
planet Earth.

Ecology: A Bridge between Science and Society

by Eugene P. Odum

This text is for non-science students looking for a basic introduction to the
principles of ecology, and their relevance in human affairs. Pleasants
examines causes of, and long-term solutions to environmental problems, and
organizes information according to several important topics in environmental
discourse: energy use and production, population and community ecology,
and types of ecosystems.

WHAT IS ECO-FICTION?
Introduction
As I wrote at Impakter, eco-fiction is made up of fictional tales that reflect important
connections, dependencies, and interactions between people and their natural
environments. Dragonfly.eco is a place to find meaningful stories about our natural world
and humanity’s connection with it. The site explores the wild, crazy, and breathtaking
literary trail of eco-fiction. Despite the genre’s rich history, beginning in the 1970s, eco-
fiction has kept up with the times. The range of stories found in this field of literature,
which can include environmental and nature themes in Black and Indigenous fiction and
 futurism, decolonization literature, magical realism, literary and contemporary fiction,
science fiction, fantasy, lunarpunk, solarpunk, 2SLGBTQ+ literature, and more, is
evolving. Diversity and inclusion are central.

I think of eco-fiction not so much as a central genre than as a literary mode that joins
environmental issues, natural landscapes—and usually human connection—into any
genre and makes it come alive. The ecological elements of stories do not usually exist
simply in the background but are integral to the story, even if used as symbols or
metaphor. Often times, writers refer to this mode of writing as rewilding the novel. The
human connection is diverse and can refer to anything from cultural diaspora to climate
refugees to weather event impacts to reverence of and protection of nature.

See more about eco-fiction at Wikipedia and in my two-part series about this category of
literature at ClimateCultures.net. I’ve also created a large world sampling over
at Medium.com.

Definitions and Explanations of Eco-fiction

Jim Dwyer researched hundreds of books for Where the Wild Books Are: A Field Guide
to Ecofiction (University of Nevada Press, 2010) and stated that his criteria in choosing
whether or not a book was eco-fiction was closely related to Lawrence Buell’s:

 The nonhuman environment is present not merely as a framing device but as a

presence that begins to suggest that human history is implicated in natural history.
 The human history is not understood to be the only legitimate interest.
 Human accountability to the environment is part of the text’s ethical orientation.
 Some sense of the environment as a process rather than as a constant or a given is at
least implicit in the text. (1995, 6)

Further, Dwyer was not exclusive with genre when describing eco-fiction:

[Eco-fiction is] made up of many styles, primarily modernism, post-

modernism, realism, and magical realism and can be found in many
genres, primarily mainstream, westerns, mystery, romance, and
speculative fiction. Speculative fiction includes science fiction and
fantasy, sometimes mixed with realism, as in the work of Ursula K.
Le Guin.
Note that John Yunker, author of The Tourist Trail and co-founder/editor at Ashland
Creek Press, called eco-fiction more of a “super genre” (personal correspondence,
August 2016).

Dwyer said that eco-fiction “might be simply described as a critical perspective on the
relationship between literature and the natural world, and the place of humanity
within.” Source: Chico News & Review
Eco-fiction, according to Mike Vasey, includes:

Stories set in fictional landscapes that capture the essence of

natural ecosystems…[They] can build around human relationships
to these ecosystems or leave out humans altogether. The story
itself, however, takes the reader into the natural world and brings it
alive…Ideally, the landscapes and ecosystems–whether fantasy or
real–should be as ‘realistic’ as possible and plot constraints should
accord with ecological principals.

Roots
Eco-fiction became popular in the 1970s, along with other environmental movements,
and opened up a new literary study that connected humanities and nature. In 1971,
Washington Press published editor John Stadler’s anthology Eco-fiction, a collection of
environmental sci-fi, which included such authors as Ray Bradbury, John Steinbeck,
Edgar Allen Poe, A.E. Coppard, James Agee, Robert M. Coates, Daphne du Maurier,
Robley Wilson Jr., E.B. White, J.F. Powers, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Sarah Orne Jewett, Frank
Herbert, H.H. Munro, J.G. Ballard, Steven Scharder, Isaac Asmiov, and William
Saroyan.

According to The Cambridge History of the American Novel‘s chapter

titled Contemporary ecofiction, “Ecofiction is an elastic term, capacious enough to
accommodate a variety of fictional works that address the relationship between natural
settings and the human communities that dwell within them. The term emerged soon
after ecology took hold as a popular scientific paradigm and a broad cultural attitude in
the 1960s and 1970s.” Eco-fiction, or ecologically oriented fiction, includes topics such
as human impacts on the environment, like climate change, and nature-oriented
literature. Source: Jim Dwyer’s Where the Wild Books Are: A Field Guide to Eco-
Fiction (University of Nevada Press, 2010). Eco-fiction includes other mediums, such
as film, art, and poetry, but this site mostly focuses on novels and short stories.

Genres
We live in a world where fiction covering ecological themes, including climate change, is
bursting out all over. Are you confused about these genres? Here’s a helpful guide.

What Is Eco-fiction and Why it

Matters
Five novels that take you into the natural world,
bringing it alive and raising awareness of the
uniqueness and fragility of our planet
byMary Woodbury

June 12, 2022

in Environment, Literature

First, a quick definition: Eco-fiction is made up of fictional tales that reflect

important connections, dependencies, and interactions between people
and their natural environments. Sometimes people are even left out
altogether, resulting in purely ecological story webs. The genre is evolving
along with the changes in our world, including newer and more accepted
scientific findings, such as climate change.
The term may have first appeared in John Statler’s anthology Eco-
fiction, (Pocket, published in 1971) which re-printed environmental sci-fi
short stories from the 1930s-60s.

You might not have ever heard of this anthology, but you’re probably
aware of some of the stories therein, such as British horror writer Daphne
du Maurier’s “The Birds,” which became a famous Alfred Hitchcock
film (released in 1963). You would also recognize many other authors in
this anthology: Ray Bradbury, John Steinbeck, Edgar Allan Poe, Kurt
Vonnegut Jr., Sarah Orne Jewett, Frank Herbert, J.G. Ballard, Isaac Asimov,
and William Saroyan.
Eco-fiction really took off in the early 1970s, when natural history and the
humanities began to intersect more, such as with ecocriticism, born out of
the idea of a “literary ecology”. But it had in fact deeper roots, going back
to Rachel Carson’s iconic Silent Spring in 1962 that acted as a wake-up
call for many baby boomers.
Jim Dwyer’s Where the Wild Books Are: A Field Guide to Eco-
Fiction (University of Nevada Press, 2010) was a great guide and resource
as it explored hundreds of novels from around the world, academically
explained the genre, gave dignity to BIPOC authors before the term ever
came about, and was slightly ahead of its time in recognizing climate
change in fiction.
 In his guide, Dwyer cites Professor Mike Vasey, San
FranciscoState University’s Estuary and Ocean Science Center, who gives
a simple definition of the genre:
“Stories set in fictional landscapes that capture the essence of natural
ecosystems…[They] can build around human relationships to these
ecosystems or leave out humans altogether. The story itself, however,
takes the reader into the natural world and brings it alive.”
Where do I find novels in this genre?
The simple answer is everywhere.
Dwyer noted that eco-fiction was not exclusive nor only realist or Earth-
based. It includes all sorts of speculative fiction, such as weird fiction,
fantasy, and science fiction. It’s also covered in the major genre
categories such as literary, mystery, thriller, historical, romance, and
contemporary. It can be dystopian or utopian. It can be apocalyptic. It can
be realistic or fantastical. It can reflect post-colonial trauma, including that
of the people and the land.
Of course, newer literary genres have come about since then, including
climate, Anthropocene, and solarpunk fictions. All share bonds that tie
authors and readers together.
Where should you start?
I’ll mention here only some of my favorites, but lists are never exhaustive
and will inherently miss many important novels and authors, so for that, I
apologize in advance.
My goal is to introduce readers to some novels within this literary ecology
—consider it a starting place.
When I think about what draws me to a story in this genre, I think of Wai
Chee Dimock’s words (she is a professor of English and American studies
at Yale) when reviewing Jeff VanderMeer’s Borne: A Novel in the New York
Times):
“This coming-of-age story signals that eco-fiction has come of age as well:
wilder, more reckless and more breathtaking than previously thought, a
wager and a promise that what emerges from the 21st century will be as
good as any from the 20th, or the 19th.”
When Borne was published in 2017, it was a Financial Times book of the
year, an Amazon Editors’ pick and selected by AMC in 2019 to be turned
into a TV series.
I’ll invite you to discover such stories, the wilder, the more reckless, and
the more breathtaking, the ones that take the reader into the natural
world and bring it alive.
Five eco-fiction novels
It’s hard to find such lists without authors like Kim Stanley Robinson,
Octavia Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin, Jeff VanderMeer, Margaret Atwood,
Barbara Kingsolver, and many others.
Because they’re often included on many recommendation lists for
ecological genres, I’ve decided to go off the path and head mostly outside
of North America to visit other places where I’ve found similarly inspiring
authors.
Fauna by Christiane Vadnais (Coach House Books, September
2020)
Beautifully translated from the French by Pablo Strauss as Vadnais is a
Quebec author, this is a collection of intertwined short stories taking place
in the far future and far north.
An atmospheric book, it takes the reader into Shivering Heights, a deep
forest, a foreboding lake, and other places where mood, natural history,
and poetics come crawling out of the soil to awaken us.
A speculative tale of end times and climate change, this read has flora
and fauna leaping alive and taking our breath away.
House of Rust by Khadija Abdalla Bajaber (Graywolf Press,
October 2021)
Khadija Abdalla Bajaber is a young Kenyan poet and journalist, and winner
of the first Graywolf Press Africa Prize in 2018; this is a coming-of-age
story about a strong-willed but vulnerable Hadhrami girl, named Aisha,
who lives in Mombasa, the town where Bajaber herself was born.
Aisha goes on a fantastical journey to find her father, who her
grandmother is convinced is dead. He is/was a fisherman, and the sea
envelopes the plot and characters, including several Alice-in-Wonderland-
like creatures that Aisha must contend with.
This is a classic magic realism novel that left me entranced.
The House of Drought by Dennis Mombauer (Stelliform Press,
coming out July 14, 2022)
Taking on aspects of the weird, Mombauer’s novella takes place across
time at a haunted house in Sri Lanka that borders woodland and
farmlands.
Something strange is happening, and the author seemingly creates new
mythological creatures that may illustrate parables in the age of climate
change.
It might be just my take, but the eerie house seems to represent our
planet. We’ve only got one, so it’s best to take care of it now.
Bangkok Wakes to Rain by Pitchaya Sudbanthad (Sceptre,
February 2019)
An epic novel traveling through time in which multiple characters intersect
in one of the most watery cities in the world: Bangkok.
This novel proves that stories about our ecological surroundings can still
be about the human, our varied histories and time on Earth, and our
interconnections with each other as well as how the environment shapes
us.
Sudbanthad takes us through time and doesn’t ignore the future of a city
that is sinking. He is a Thai writer who splits his time between Bangkok
and Brooklyn, New York, and was named a Fellow in Fiction by the New
York Foundation for the Arts in 2018. Here is a video interview in which he
explains his book:
Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin (Oneworld Publications,
March 2017)
Schweblin is an Argentine Spanish-speaking author currently living in
Berlin; this is her first book translated into English, but she achieved
international fame earlier, in 2010 when Granta magazine selected her as
one of the best Spanish language authors under 35.
Taking place in Argentina, Fever Dream features a long dialog between a
woman and her friend’s son. By bits and pieces, we understand that
sickness is traveling throughout the community from poisons in a nearby
stream.
It’s an unsettling novel that weaves nature, friendships, family, and
memories into back-and-forward-flashes that surreally mimic a fever
dream. The excellently adapted movie also came out in September 2021.
What all five books have in common is that, beyond being unusually good
reads, they leave you asking questions once you’ve read the last page:
What have we done to Nature, where are we, humans, going with this,
and what should we do? These are necessary questions to ask but only
good literature can bring them up with the needed urgency – and all the
while, giving us the simple pleasure of reading.

Editors Note: The opinions expressed here by Impakter.com columnists

are their own, not those of Impakter.com — In the Featured Photo:
Photo by Darkmoon_Art from Pixabay, Italy (cc)
Tags: Bangkok Wakes To Rain eco-fictionFaunaFever DreamSilent SpringThe House of

DroughtThe House of RustWhere the Wild Books Are

The Word for Literature Is

Ecofiction
BY CARA TEJPAL

JANUARY 15, 2023APRIL 29, 2023

A personal essay on the genre of environmental fiction, plus a
reading list to set the mood.
The thirst of this mountainside is insatiable. Day or night, the rain comes in all
tempos. Furiously sluicing through the forest in arrows or tumbling down in grim
sheets. A reassuring drizzle tapping on the roof or the gossamer touch of monsoon
mists. Through it all the mountain drinks steadily, absorbing each bead of water
that filters through the canopy to touch her soil.
Every year I come here alone, with a two-point agenda: to walk and to read.
Unshackled from the grime and chaos of the city, I am in the thrall of the
Himalayas. This is where priorities shift and perspectives expand. My daily
rambles through the forest scour my city-rusted senses. My feet seek footholds on
the mountain paths; my eyes search for fungi and wild animals; my hands caress
textured bark. I inhale the scent of the saturated earth and fill my lungs with air that
tastes like spring water.

My usual literary tastes narrow when I am here. All the millions of brilliant books
that do not centre nature now seem dull. I am instead ravenous for ecological
fiction, the only genre that can possibly allow me to relish or understand the
brutality and beauty of the world more intimately.

‘A forest ecology is a delicate one. If the forest perishes, its fauna may go with it.
The Athshean word for world is also the word for forest.’

In Ursula K Le Guin’s stunning 1972 novella The Word for World Is Forest, the
peaceful natives of the fictional planet of Athshe revolt against the cruel
colonisation of their world by yumens (humans) from Earth. Half a century after it
was first published, the novella seems to be more relevant than ever. Book blogs
persistently categorise it as sci-fi, but its commentary on war, colonialism,
machismo and environmental destruction is almost certainly a thinly veiled critique
of the world we live in today. In fact it is so unbearably prescient that I had to
double-check its date of publication.

In popular culture the time we inhabit is labelled the Anthropocene: the epoch of
human domination, where our actions shape every ecosystem in the world and
even influence the climate. I like the term, but I do feel it smacks of human
arrogance. We humans view the world from the narrow scope of our umwelt—the
unique sensory world of each organism—and have claimed our perspective as
universal truth despite much evidence to the contrary. We are special. We are
different. We are apart from nature, are we not?

Yet every environmentalist I know reassures themselves by rejecting this

perspective. They zoom out from what feels so intensely personal and tragic to a
place of wider objectivity. We are just one ephemeral form in an endless ocean of
energy. It is a perspective I have stumbled across uncountable times in the books
that have moved me. ‘Man does not possess the soil: he is possessed by it. He can
grip the soil in his fist, but it laughs, and waits; and one day he drops down, and
the soil is enriched. Grass and mandia and rice grow out of him, and they too fall
back into the soil…’ writes Gopinath Mohanty in Paraja. Published in 1945, it is
the agonising story of the downfall of a tribal family in the Koraput hills of Odisha.
Richard Powers is fleetingly less lyrical than usual in his sprawling 2019 Pulitzer
Prize–winning book The Overstory. Each one of us, he writes, is just a ‘sack of
rotting meat wrapped around a little sewage tube that’s going to give out in—
what? Another few thousand sunrises?’

In one sense, I believe all literature is ecofiction. Anything that has ever been
written and that will ever be written is rooted in the ecology of the planet. The
millions of exclusively human-centred books are what might actually be niche. My
father suggests that every book ever printed is steeped in the essence of ecofiction:
the result of the transmutation of nature, in the form of trees, into the fantasy
evoked by words.

Exploring Ecofiction

Ecofiction focuses on nature-oriented stories, but beyond this fragile common

thread , these stories are genre-defying and diverse. I imagine that the two
extremes of ecofiction that I have discerned are wonderment and warning. In
exploring natural history, themes of environmental balance and the consequences
of environmental exploitation, books in this category regularly elicit wide-eyed
wonder and uneasy dread.

You can slip between the two in seconds, or you can traverse the entire spectrum of
human emotions to arrive from one to the other. See how quickly Hanya
Yanagihara first exults and then disappoints us in her riveting, unsettling 2013
debut novel, The People in the Trees, which follows an expedition to a remote
island in search of a lost tribe and their secret to immortality:

‘[I]n that white flower I was reminded of the blossoms I had grown up with…[I]t
seemed the loveliest thing I had seen for many days, and I stood there staring at
it. But as I continued stumbling over to the creek, I saw that the flower was no
flower at all but rather a crumple of tissue, at its heart a smear of blood. I felt a
sort of fury…’

I’ve never seen H P Lovecraft’s At The Mountains of Madness (usually described

as sci-fi or horror) included on any ecofiction list. But it has a place on mine. It
was written in the 1930s, but to read it in this decade, when we have been warned
that thawing permafrost can release deadly viruses, is to appreciate its foresight.
The novella details the exploration of a fictional Antarctic mountain range and
contains this ominous warning:
‘It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of
earth’s dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let alone; lest sleeping
abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares
squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests.’

Barbara Kingsolver’s more conventionally ecofiction novels Prodigal

Summer and Flight Behaviour are chockablock with gorgeous nature prose. Both
books tell interweaving stories set in the mountains of Appalachia, and both centre
specific species. The former holds a hidden den of coyotes close to its heart, and
the latter orbits a monarch butterfly migration. She writes:

‘Solitude is a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life

underfoot, a tug of impalpable thread on the web pulling mate to mate and
predator to prey, a beginning or an end. Every choice is a world made new for the
chosen.’

When I am in wild places, I read ecofiction to further compound my wonder. When

I am distressed by environmental crises, I read ecofiction to find solace and
companionship in my woes. When I am trapped in the city, I read ecofiction to
alleviate my ecological boredom—that dissatisfaction that arises from being
alienated from the wilds that we have so recently in evolutionary history isolated
ourselves from. It’s a handy term borrowed from George Monbiot’s highly
recommended non-fiction book Feral.

This essay is inadequate, as all essays that seek to explore literature will be. I have
not touched upon cli-fi such as Clade, The New Wilderness or Hummingbird
Salamander, nor conservation stories such as The Tusk That Did the
Damage or What’s Left of the Jungle, whose spine I am yet to crack. Hot
favourites Anita Desai’s Fire on the Mountain and Amitav Ghosh’s Gun
Island too have been neglected, even as they sit patiently on my bookshelf. And I
have not approached ecofiction for young adults, whose champions in India
include Bijal Vachharajani, Ranjit Lal, Ruskin Bond and Stephen Alter. I am both
resigned to and elated by the fact that reading ecofiction is an endless endeavour.
In her book Latitudes of Longing, which starts in the tropical heat of the Andaman
Islands and ends in the rugged beauty of the Karakoram mountains, Shubhangi
Swarup writes, ‘[C]ompared to all the glorious lives one can lead, the human one
is quite a chore.’

Ah, but eco fiction temporarily vanquishes the tedium and allows us to taste, for a
moment, other glorious lives.
 On My Bookshelf

Wolf Totem by Jiang Rong

Bewilderment by Richard Powers

The History of Bees by Maja Lunde

Greenwood by Michael Christie

The Bear by Andrew Krivark

The Upheaval by Pundalik N. Naik

The Book of the Hunter by Mahasweta Devi

The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey

Waste Tide by Chen Qiufan

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

Everything the Light Touches by Janice Pariat

The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert

The inaugural Kodai Chronicle Environmental Fiction Prize is accepting entries

till 31st January, 2023. For more details, click here.
Memory of Water


Automatic
Light

Dark
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is about the novel. For the film adaptation, see Memory of Water (2022
film). For the unrelated Spanish film, see Memory of Water (1994 film).

Memory of Water
 First Finnish p/b edition

Author Emmi Itäranta

Original title Teemestarin kirja

Language English

Genre Climate fiction

Speculative fiction

Publication date 2012 (Teos)

Published in English 2014 (HarperCollins)

Media type Print

Pages 266

ISBN 9780007529919

Memory of Water (Finnish: Teemestarin kirja, "The Tea Master's Book") is

the debut novel by Finnish author Emmi Itäranta, published in 2014
by HarperCollins. The Finnish version of the novel, which Itäranta wrote
simultaneously along with the English one,[1] was published in Finland in 2013 by the
publishing house Teos. Set in a dystopian future where fresh water is scarce, it tells
the story of Noria, a young tea master's apprentice, who must come to terms with a
great secret and even greater responsibility that follows this knowledge.[2]

The Finnish manuscript won the Fantasy and Sci-Fi Literary Fiction contest
organised by Teos in 2012 and was subsequently published. The book won
the Kalevi Jäntti Award in 2012, and the Nuori Aleksis Award in 2013. It was also
shortlisted for the 2013 Tähtivaeltaja Award.[3]

The English language version of the book has been featured on several shortlists in
both the US and the UK - the Philip K. Dick Award, Compton Crook Award, Golden
Tentacle Award and Arthur C. Clarke Award.[4][5][6][7] The novel also appeared on the
2014 James Tiptree, Jr. Award Honor List.[8]

In 2022, a film adaptation based on the novel was released, directed by Saara
Saarela and starring Saga Sarkola.[9]

References
[edit]

1. ^ Buxton, Charlotta. "How to write a novel in two languages – a writing interview

with Emmi Itäranta". Londonlotta. Archived from the original on 3 August 2014.
Retrieved 20 January 2015.
2. ^ Farmar, Katherine. "Memory of Water by Emmi Itäranta". Strange Horizons.
Archived from the original on 5 March 2015. Retrieved 26 January 2015.
3. ^ Stenger, Wif (9 June 2014). "Finnish dystopian debut stirs literary interest in
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