![]() Ideas that are strange or improbable are condemned with labels like “science fiction” and “fantasy.” Character, plot, setting, and motivation-these are drilled into writers’ heads as the building blocks of story. ![]() “Probability and the modern novel are in fact twins,” Ghosh writes, “born at about the same time, among the same people, under a shared star that destined them to work as vessels for the containment of the same kind of experience.” Realism has been at the core of fiction for centuries. ![]() Ghosh argues that “if certain literary forms are unable to negotiate these torrents, then they will have failed.”īut is that really a failure of our collective imagination? Or is it just a failure of how we channel our imagination-in forms grounded in 17th-century notions of individuality, character, and realism? That is to say, is this a failure of imagination or a failure of the novel? he mere mention of the subject is often enough to relegate a novel or a short story to the genre of science fiction.” The problem, in Ghosh’s mind, isn’t that we haven’t acknowledged the externalities of a warming atmosphere-quite the opposite, actually-but rather that we haven’t taken the next logical step and interrogated the extent to which the narratives we value are complicit in the status quo. He writes that “climate change casts a much smaller shadow within the landscape of literary fiction than it does even in the public arena. IN HIS 2016 book-length essay on climate change, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, Amitav Ghosh describes the lack of contemporary novels concerned with nature and the environment as an imaginative failure.
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