Twenty-four stories in a collection of climate fiction that seek to imagine what cities might look like in a future of multi-species co-existence and green justice.
Review by Leanne Ogasawara
Set primarily in the Asia-Pacific, the twenty-four stories of this new collection of climate fiction seek to imagine what cities might look like in a future of multi-species co-existence and green justice. Firmly planted in the new genre of solarpunk, the stories are filled with a polyphony of voices—some non-human and a few non-alive—working together to bring about solutions that address global warming, the extinction of animal species, and coming climate disaster.
Gone is the bleak, trashed landscape devoid of animal life so characteristic of much science fiction, and cyberpunk in particular; instead we find ourselves in cities that are alive, shared by humans and animals, insects and plants, land forms and machines. And the authors ask: What might city ecosystems look like in the future if we strive for multispecies justice in our urban settings?
In these “more-than-human stories,” twenty-four authors, mainly of Asian-Pacific descent, investigate humanity’s relationship with the rest of the natural world, placing characters in situations where humans have to look beyond their own needs and interests. In such an interconnected world, we find: dolphins and humans learning each other’s languages in a story by Shweta Taneja; a multiplicity of voices, including stars and rivers, in stories by Priya Sarukkai Chabria and Eliza Victoria; or where a bad date in Hawai‘i takes an unexpected turn in a story by N. R. M. Roshak, the couple stumbles upon some confused sea turtle hatchlings and take the time to figure out how to help.
In one of the more memorable stories, “The Mammoth Steps” by Andrew Dana Hudson, we find an unlikely friendship between a boy and an extinct animal. The boy’s family is paid by carbon traders to roam the Siberian grasslands with the woolly mammoths. The animals were brought back using de-extinction gene splicing technology in an effort to save the world. This is not just fiction: talk of doing this has been floating around among scientists to address real concerns over the thawing of arctic permafrost, which would cause greenhouse gas emissions to skyrocket and raise global temperatures even further than currently projected. In this scenario the mammoths are brought back from extinction to trample down the mosses and shrubs and uproot trees, thereby bringing down temperatures. The story is not about the human triumph over a human-created problem, but is rather a tale of inter-species love and cooperation that follows the pair on a trek across Asia in search of elephants.
Interestingly, this is not necessarily a vegan world, since “multispecies justice” does not suggest straightforward notions of care, guardianship, and living and letting live, but rather acting both responsively and responsibly in both life and death. In one of the more disturbing stories, “A Life with Cibi,” by Japanese author Natsumi Tanaka, we are confronted with the breakdown of our notions about bodily autonomy and food: As creatures walking around our cities talk to us, we carve off our flesh to eat. But this is not the call to vegetarianism as one might expect. When the narrator of the story becomes emotionally close to one of the Cibi, refusing to eat it anymore, the creature dies since that kind of culling is what kept it healthy. This story, like many of the others in the collection, challenges our notions of what some eco-philosophers call our hyper-separation.
It not surprising to see an anthology that is, by intention, set primarily in the future cities of the Asia-Pacific. Many of the world’s megacities are situated in Asia and it is this region where the early symptoms of change were first noticed. Japanese manga and anime has been at the forefront of the solarpunk movement, but so too has the new architecture found in Singapore and elsewhere around Asia. Examples of the aesthetic include, Gardens by the Bay in Singapore, the Golden Bridge in Vietnam, and green tower skyscrapers and cafes in Chengdu and Shanghai.
Readers not familiar with solarpunk will benefit from reading the engaging introduction (written by Christoph Rupprecht, Deborah Cleland, Norie Tamura, and Rajat Chaudhuri) that gives context to the stories. Of course, some of the stories were first published elsewhere, but the introduction enriches the reading by laying out how specific stories were chosen for this anthology. It is also a dazzling eye-opening call for the reform of literature, perhaps reminiscent of Amitab Ghosh’s 2016 book, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, in which he calls for authors to try to imagine a future of climate change. Since Ghosh’s book, we have, in fact, seen many works of fiction that do just as he demanded: Imagine our world—right now—of climate change.
What is so interesting about Multispecies Cities: Solarpunk Urban Futures is the call for changes not just in terms of content, but about form, questioning progress-based narratives, stories of the individual, the lone hero, people against people, and others. Yes, this means no more standard character-arcs or the dreaded character-based story. At first, readers might feel disoriented at these stories of cooperation, where rivers speak and stars can be heard. You might even want to re-read some of them to assess what is going on when there is no winning or losing, overcoming or failure. In “The Exuberant Vitality of Hatchling Habitats” by D.A. Xiaolin Spires, we follow along as a quirky eco-businessman sees broader applications for a high school science fair project. Readers might be expecting him to steal the kids’ project for his own gain or some intrigue regarding the friends, but none of this happens. Science is gentle and there is a multiplicity of voices. These stories of solutions look toward a green future of healthy ecosystems and cities teeming with life.