Book review: David Herkt on new climate fiction anthology Scorchers

Scorchers: A Climate Fiction Anthology

Scorchers: A Climate Fiction Anthology
Edited by Paul Mountfort and Rosslyn Prosser
(Steam Press, $29)
Reviewed by David Herkt

It seems to be much easier to deny or ignore climate change in the hope that it will just go away than to do anything about it – except that it hasn't gone anywhere. There are 81,000ha [200,000 acres] of Amazonian rain-forest burnt off every day. The extent of the Arctic sea-ice is amongst the lowest ever recorded. In New Zealand, obtaining insurance for houses on low-lying land is becoming problematic. Wildfires now occur every summer. It is only to be expected that this situation is being reflected in newly published fiction.

Scorchers: A Climate Fiction Anthology examines the subject through 16 short stories by transtasman authors. Edited by Paul Mountfort from Auckland University of Technology and Rosslyn Prosser from the University of Adelaide, the collection ranges widely in both style and subject.

Emma Ashmere's initial story, The Foreseeable, sets the tone, featuring a future Australia and the problem of how to create both art and relationships amid an apocalyptic eco-crisis. It is an evocative work with its descriptions of enigmatic theatrical events, creaking Queensland verandas, over-lush tropical vegetation and exhausted water tanks. By defamiliarising everything, Ashmere allows her reader fresh insights.

Patricia Grace's elegant and condensed The Unremembered retells and enlarges Māori myth for a new time, extending the past into the future. It also points to an essential feature of the anthology. Scorchers might be Australasian in scope but it is culturally very disparate. The New Zealand contributors invariably envisage a future where Māori and Pākehā world-views have mingled. This is not the case with the relationship of the Australian writers to their nation's indigenous perspectives. The glossary contains hundreds of Māori words but not one Aboriginal.

There are some very recognisable authors. In Tāwhaki, Witi Ihimaera writes mythic space-opera, curiously mixing 1950s sci-fi movies with 2020 ecological fears. Mike Johnson takes J.G. Ballard as an exemplar in The Coming of the Grey Ghost, where the visceral feel of a world poised upon a literal brink is pragmatically recounted but poetically posed.

Stand-out stories include Alison Wong's The Garden, whose grounded everyday detail has a stronger impact than many of the anthology's more dramatic scientific scenarios. Renee Liang's The Waterfall explores the ideas of outside and inside, danger and safety, and – somehow very presciently – the implications of being masked and unmasked.

Scorchers provides an example of just how Australasian writers deal imaginatively with the real world-changing events around them. It is news in the making. Like all anthologies, it can be uneven, but its best stories are both thought-provoking and imaginatively unforgettable.