Read till the end of the world

Even if you avoid the news, climate change is getting harder to ignore when September is hotter than mid-July and we now have to block off part of the calendar for floods. Sometimes it feels like the apocalypse can’t be too far away; at other times, it feels like it is already here. The end-times is a topic that has occupied the human imagination since the caveman days, appearing in everything from founding myths and religious texts to speculative non-fiction. Here are four books that take you through a climate-centered apocalypse in its different stages.

Global by Eoin Colfer and Andrew Donkin

We kick off the list by zooming in on the present-day reality, where even the Global North is beginning to feel the bite of climate change, the reality of which has been the lived experience of the Global South for decades now.

 Meet our protagonists: Yuki - who gets lost in the icy wilderness during a quest to document the Grolar Bear (a polar/grizzly hybrid resulting from warped migration patterns) - and Sami who is lost at sea, the very sea whose rising waters have already claimed his parents and his childhood home. Amidst their terrifying, suspenseful adventures, lies a powerful message about human resilience, and our interconnected relationships.

We follow the adventures of these two young people in a braided narrative in Global, a graphic novel by best-selling duo Eoin Colfer and Andrew Donkin, illustrated by Giovanni Rigano, and the crew behind the hugely popular Artemis Fowl (2001) novel series. Set partly in the Arctic Circle and partly in the Bay of Bengal, this moving story puts human faces on the climate crisis, showing us the ways in which people’s lives are affected.

Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton

Eleanor Catton’s first new venture since her Luminaries won the Booker, this one is a straight up thriller, pitting an idealistic environmental rights group versus a billionaire psychopath. 

In this novel, 'Birnam Wood' is the name of a fictional 'guerilla gardening' collective in New Zealand, a group of environmentalists who commit the 'crime' of planting native plants in abandoned bits of land and public property to battle habitat loss, food insecurity, and pollution. They accidentally find themselves in the crosshairs of a charming billionaire who makes them an offer they can't refuse. 

As the story progresses and the characters reveal their moral compasses, you  get a good idea as to why it looks like the bad guys are winning. I was reminded of vintage Sidney Sheldon books - the juxtaposition of glamour and unsavory characters. It’s a thesis on the moral and ethical dilemmas of Doing the Right Thing, and the fallibility of being human, riddled as we are with all our vices. A fast-paced nail biter with a message.

Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice

Waubgeshig Rice’s chilling novel tells us that the apocalypse is already happening, and it’s only a matter of time before it catches up to us. Easily one of the most frightening things I’ve read, and given our current ongoing power crisis, this one hits very close to home. 

The narrative is tightly bound to the perspective of a small Anishinaabe community living on a reservation up in Ontario. An unexplained event knocks out power and communications right at the start of winter and now they must scramble to survive. Divisions are created between those who retain some knowledge of the old ways, and those more reliant on modern technology. These divisions are further reinforced by the arrival of a white man bearing arms and liquor. It feels like an eerie repeat of the Zhaagnaash (the Ojibwe word for calamity, not unlike what 'Nakba' means to Palestinians).

The first part of a duology, the story is a sobering look at where we're headed, yes, but also woven into the narrative is the subtle reminder that indigenous traditions may see us through the worst times if we just listen to Nature.

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

 An oldie but goodie from the visionary Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake is set in the future, after a plague has wiped out almost all of humanity, and the planet is beset by man-made environmental disasters, and overrun by creatures born in labs where the white man once played god and tinkered with bio-engineering. The sole survivor and narrative perspective is a broken man who calls himself Snowman, who lives amongst the peaceable humanoid creatures he calls “Crakers”. Through Snowman’s fragments of clarity and fevered flashbacks, we piece together the story of his former life as Jimmy, a damaged young man who led a coddled life in a protected compound where his father worked as a genographer, and how human hubris led to its own undoing.

Given that this book, the first in a series, came out in 2003, you have to marvel at Atwood’s ability for credible, and even prescient world-building. Everything she writes seems a plausible progression of a reality we already inhabit, a logical next step. And that’s precisely what makes her work so chilling.