Kate Knibbs is a Senior Writer at WIRED covering culture, and is the author of ‘The Hottest New Literary Genre is Doomer Lit.’ Today, Kate joins Ross to explain what inspired her conception of the new (sub)genre, discussing what differentiates doomer lit from cli-fi and how Jenny Offill’s new novel Weather functions as a mood piece on climate change.
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Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hey, Reversing Climate Change fans. I want to take a brief second to tell you about a new podcast called Heat of the Moment, coming from the folks at foreignpolicy. com. It’s produced by FP Studios and the Climate Investment Funds. This 12-part series looks at the climate crisis from a number of different angles, including food waste, energy production, and deforestation, and provides hope for a way forward. Each episode features a comprehensive interview with an expert as well as an in-depth field report. They even had Ed Begley Jr. on, who as you may know, was once the drummer of Spinal Tap before he had a bizarre gardening accident.
They’re getting some serious guests out there. It is a good show, well worth your time. That’s heat of the moment. Look for it on your favorite podcast platform. Hey, everyone. Welcome to Season 2 of Reversing Climate Change. We are doing that podcast thing now and launching a Patreon. You can find it at patreon. com slash noripodcasts. There are various tiers with different types of goodies available. Do you want to receive a special newsletter digest of what norinauts are reading that week? Be a part of a nori book club? Get special access to nori events?
Go take a look at patreon. com slash noripodcasts for what we’re offering. And in that spirit of being lean in that startup kind of way that, you know, we like to do, this list of goodies is subject to change and we’d very much like your feedback. Is there something that you’d really like to see but it isn’t listed here? Honest feedback does a lot to help us shape what we offer to you. You can send an email to podcast. nori. com or fill out our podcast survey anonymously in our newsletter which you can find at nori.
com slash subscribe. And thank you so much for listening to another season of Reversing Climate Change. Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon. I am lead strategist at the Nori Carbon Removal Marketplace. Today I have with me Kate Nibbs, senior writer at Wired. Kate, thank you for being here.
Kate Knibbs: Thanks for having me.
Ross Kenyon: I’m not sure how I found out about your article, but it came my way. It’s in Wired and it’s called The Hottest New Literary Genre is Doomer Lit. Of course, I had to read this. I like literature. I care about climate change. Naturally, this sucked me in. So thank you for writing it. What brought you to thinking about Doomer Lit and what exactly is that?
Kate Knibbs: I had just been reading a lot of Books that dealt with climate change, I had sort of decided to give myself a survey of what’s often called cli-fi. It’s like a play on sci-fi, right? Yes, it’s a play on sci-fi. Just because I felt like historically climate change has been something that’s been hard for artists to turn into compelling literature, but there are exceptions and I wanted to familiarize myself with them. And then Jenny Offal’s Weather was coming out. So I had an advanced copy of that. And after I read it, I was struck by the fact that it did take climate change so explicitly as its sole subject.
And it really was not speculative fiction or science fiction in any way. Instead, it was very much so stylized Literary fiction in the domestic realm. And I felt like this is probably the beginning of something we’re going to see more frequently. What was once sort of cordoned off as genre work is now going to just be a completely mainstream subject for all art. And that’s sort of why I thought I wanted to explore why we’ve arrived at this moment where, you know, climate change is now. Just part of the world that we write about no matter what mode we’re working in.
It’s just something that’s kind of inescapable if you’re going to create art as a human being living in 2020.
Ross Kenyon: Indeed, and we’re going to talk about a bunch of examples of works within this genre or adjacent to it. And so this is just a general spoiler alert. Some of this stuff is new. Some of it is older. If you don’t want anything within this genre discussed or potentially ruined for you, then you can skip it. In fact, in the show notes, maybe at the top of the show notes, I’ll list all the things that we talk about in case you want to avoid listening to this just yet. Okay, Kate, so this is a good baseline that we’ve set, but also you use the term doomer lit.
And so what’s the relationship between cli-fi, climate fiction, and doomer lit?
Kate Knibbs: So not all climate fiction is doomer lit because a lot of climate fiction is more hopeful about the future of humanity. What I had been noticing with the weather and with some other contemporary fiction is just a pervasive feeling of fatalism. And that’s what I think distinguishes it and makes it Doomer-like. I took the term Doomer from the internet. Have you seen any of the Doomer memes?
Ross Kenyon: I’m sad to say that I have not seen much of this until you brought it to my attention in this article.
Kate Knibbs: Okay. So there are like pockets of the internet, especially on Reddit and some other forums where this like archetype of the doomer has emerged and it tends to be like a young millennial man who is really pessimistic and sort of not apathetic, but resigned to the fact that climate change is going to destroy the world. And I was definitely using the phrase loosely when I sort of was trying to coin the term Dumerlet because it’s not like every book that I’ve discussed has a character like that or anything. I just sort of was thinking, you know, what’s an easy shorthand for this emerging subgenre where hope is really minimized and A grim attitude pervades the work.
Ross Kenyon: That’s okay. So that’s a good way to start unpacking it. And some of the examples that you mentioned in the article are ones that I’ve been thinking about too, especially ones that are notably grim, famously grim, like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road or Children of Men, Snowpiercer. And then even I just watched First Reformed, which I hadn’t seen until I read your piece about this. But they all sort of end on an up note, right? At the road, you have to keep the fire alive. There’s hope for the next generation. You have to keep on trying.
Children of men, there’s a new child is born signaling maybe an end to the fertility crisis. Snow piercing. They escaped the train. And it seems optimistic. Of course, you’re right to point out in your article that like, will these kids survive out in the frozen tundra? I don’t know. But it felt hopeful to me. And then First Reformed 2, I’d like to talk some about that because I’m still processing it. Either that very end shot is either extremely hopeful about a chance for redemption and starting over and believing in the future again, or it’s just sort of like a last kiss on the precipice of chaos.
I’m not sure which way you go with that one. But at least in weather, weather did not feel this way to me. Weather felt tonally pretty consistent. And there wasn’t a note at the end where I was thinking, oh, good, things might work out or they found a new reason to live and keep going and keep trying. That’s the human way. Am I on to something or not really?
Kate Knibbs: No, totally. That’s what stuck out so much when I was reading it is that there’s no hopeful coda. It’s just sort of a mood piece about someone confronting the realities of climate change, which I think that is going to mean that a lot of people will read the book and walk away a little unsatisfied because it doesn’t really have much of an arc. It’s basically just a meditation. I’m hoping that in the future, people who want to write in like the Doomer lit register are able to move beyond like a mood piece.
And I’d like to see a rollicking Doomer narrative, but I don’t know if we’re there yet.
Ross Kenyon: Maybe not. I think there’s something that’s useful about it. So intellectually, I’m attracted to this idea that this is best exemplified by Charlie Kaufman’s character in Adaptation, where he’s talking He’s talking about how life is about these small little moments of anxiety and nothing really happens in life. And then he’s struggling to write this screenplay where nothing really happens until he asks his twin brother for help. And his brother is reading these books about how the three-act structure works and how human Tell stories to be most effective and to write this sort of like blockbuster kind of movie.
And then the movie just takes off and becomes that other thing, which I think is genius. It’s still one of my favorite films. But if you told a story that was like Charlie Kaufman’s version at the beginning of adaptation where nothing much happens, the end is pretty similar to the beginning. If you told a story like that to someone at a bar, wouldn’t they be like, why did you just tell me that? Why did you waste 90 minutes of my time for something that ends where it begins? What’s the point of that?
Kate Knibbs: Yeah, especially since most of my friends who I would go to a bar with are already really worried about climate change. I feel like they’d just be like, I know.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, thanks for that, Kate. That was wonderful.
Kate Knibbs: Yeah, so in the article that I wrote, I gave some more examples that were sort of adjacent, but they were all slightly more helpful than weather. Like weather was definitely the most...
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I’m trying to think about other things that I’ve read or experienced where it’s more of a backdrop of a near future environment rather than the theme of it itself. And I guess, I don’t know, have you read any of Kim Stanley Robinson’s recent works about climate change?
Kate Knibbs: I haven’t. And so many people recommended it to me while I was doing my survey. I’m going to. I just, I did not have time to read everything, but I’ve heard only good things about it. Is there a book in particular that you would recommend?
Ross Kenyon: He has one, I haven’t read this one yet, but it’s the New York 2140. But this is broadly how I think about this split in literature. I’m talking way too much, Kate. I’m not only supposed to be interviewing you, but I’m very passionate about this and I have stuff to say.
Kate Knibbs: No, this is great. This is great.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. And I think a lot of sci-fi, speculative fiction, historical fiction too, they’re primarily interested in world building and creating a sense of mood, as you said, or I remember more in the books of those genres that I named, I remember being in that place. More than I can often remember any specific character or even plot points a lot of the time. And I usually contrast that against something that’s more character heavy, like reading Leo Tolstoy. And I read something like Anna Karenina when I first read it years ago. I would flip back and forth between who I most empathize with.
I would be like, oh, I totally understand Vronsky or Anna. I’m inside her head. Karenin, I get this guy who’s trying his best but is like stuck by social norms and Kitty and Levin and I would flip between And I have almost none of that for any sort of speculative fiction, historical fiction, sci-fi, anything quite like that. Kim Stanley Robinson, this isn’t necessarily a criticism, but reading him or Neil Stevenson or James Michener or people who are writing in these genres, I remember being there, but I don’t always remember what happened so strongly.
Do you think that’s kind of like related to your mood piece feel? And then is this just a problem for these genres as a whole?
Kate Knibbs: I mean, ideally they would be able to combine really elaborate world building with great character building, but I think it is hard to do everything perfectly. I was just thinking about this book, Blackfish City, that I read, and it’s by a writer named Sam Miller, and it’s a really great book. I didn’t bring it up in my piece because it does have a pretty hopeful ending, but I will say that it’s sort of set in a seasteading Post-apocalyptic community where...
Ross Kenyon: I’m already sold.
Kate Knibbs: It’s really good. And the way that Miller describes the Blackfish City and the world is very, very vivid. And I definitely remember it more than what happens to the characters. It’s just one of those things where Sometimes I think that it’s not necessarily that the writers are bad at characterization. It’s just that they’re so good at world building that what you end up remembering is the universe rather than the specifics. You know what I was thinking about when we were talking about how difficult it is to write compelling fiction and art about climate change is Game of Thrones.
Are you familiar?
Ross Kenyon: I had a... I never read it. And I gave up a couple seasons in mostly because I felt like I needed a map. I was like, wait, what’s the family tree here? And like, where are we? But I have enough of a cultural understanding. It’s okay. You can continue.
Kate Knibbs: Okay. Because... So I was like a Game of Thrones super fan. And okay, this is definitely like, if you don’t want to be spoiled for Game of Thrones, don’t listen to what I have to say. Although I feel like anyone with With actual like active interest in Game of Thrones probably already knows how it ends.
Ross Kenyon: I think that’s fair, but you’ve heard it listeners. Fair warning.
Kate Knibbs: You mind if I spoil it for you?
Ross Kenyon: Just ruin Game of Thrones for everyone still listening.
Kate Knibbs: It’s already kind of ruined to be honest. So the last season I thought was very bad. A lot of people I think would agree with me. And so throughout this series, the... White Walkers, the threat from the north, from beyond the wall, is this monstrous, supernatural army of the dead. And for most of the series, people thought that one of the points it was trying to make was that you have all these petty political squabbles, and then people are ignoring the real threat. So there were a lot of essays and think pieces about how Game of Thrones was cli-fi with the army of the dead as a metaphor for climate change.
The problem is that for people who have seen the last season of Game of Thrones, they basically dispatch with the ultimate showdown between the army of the dead and humans in favor of just returning to the political squabble. And I think it’s because It’s part of this problem where writers have a hard time creating a narrative where climate change is an active force. Because there was no way to really wrap it up without the climate monsters winning, essentially. And so they had to go through all these hoops to make it so that the humans were able to win that were pretty narratively unsatisfying.
Yeah, so that is my, that’s one of my hot takes is that Game of Thrones’ last season sucked because writers don’t know how to deal with climate change.
Ross Kenyon: Wait, so in the end though, the bad guys didn’t win and you’re saying they had to do these weird ellipses to get around that? Is that what happened?
Kate Knibbs: Yeah, so I’m just going to tell you the plot of the last season of Game of Thrones basically.
Ross Kenyon: This episode took a turn, but yeah, let’s do it Kate.
Kate Knibbs: Most people thought that the final season would be about the humans trying to defeat the White Walkers. But instead, what happened was halfway through the final season, they just had the, there was sort of like a dukes ex machina, dukes machina, I don’t know how to pronounce it.
Ross Kenyon: I think deus ex machina.
Kate Knibbs: Yes, deus ex machina, where they were able, the humans were able to defeat this army of the dead that had been being hyped up as like an indestructible army of Fairly easily. And then they just sort of dropped that pot and went back to everything else. And it sort of really messed with the shape of the series as a whole because it had for all of the seasons been building to the showdown and then it just scuttled the showdown. And that was one of the reasons why people were so unsatisfied, I think, because structurally it was just not good storytelling.
Ross Kenyon: I remember when I was in grade school that I forget why we were doing this sort of like raise your hand and share something. But I think we were talking about shows that we liked. And are you of the generation, Kate, where you grew up watching Are You Afraid of the Dark?
Kate Knibbs: Yes.
Ross Kenyon: Amazing. Okay, good. I’m glad to hear this. Did you see that episode with Nosferatu and he comes out of the screen?
Kate Knibbs: That’s familiar to me, but I don’t know that I could recall any specific plot points. I bet you did not think we were going to talk about are you afraid of the characters.
Ross Kenyon: But I remember sharing because at the end of that episode, Nosferatu wins. He like sort of gets all the kids or I remember that was the first time I’ve ever seen a piece of media where the bad guy won. I remember raising my hand and being like, I like this episode because the bad guy wins and that never happens. And I remember my teacher being not totally weirded out by it, but maybe like, okay, that’s a strange reason to like something. But why can’t stories be told like that once in a while?
I think it would be great if... Are you saying that Game of Thrones should have ended with just the White Walkers winning and climate change overwhelming humans and that’s the end of the story?
Kate Knibbs: I think that would have been better than what happened.
Ross Kenyon: Why can’t we just do that? Why is that not a narrative possibility for storytellers?
Kate Knibbs: I don’t know.
Ross Kenyon: That’s what Doomerlet is, I guess.
Kate Knibbs: Yeah. We’ll just have to see if we get better at it, I guess, as we go along.
Ross Kenyon: I’ve also seen people really challenge this idea too. And they’ll say like climate doom is morally equivalent to climate denialism and saying that this sort of fatalism with regard to climate change is really not helpful and unethical and damaging. But I don’t know. I think people need a way to productively Deal with these feelings. And climate change is famous as a story that is hard to tell. Our brains maybe did not even evolve to really be able to understand what is happening in a good way. Humans are not good at understanding how risk works.
Yes.
Kate Knibbs: As we’ve recently been made aware of, very much so in New York City by what’s currently happening, which is we’re recording this. I’m in my living room. I can’t leave my living room right now. Because of COVID-19. And a few weeks ago, this definitely seemed more like an abstract possibility than something that could actually really happen. And I think it’s for the same reason why we can’t wrap our heads around climate change. It’s hard to grasp such radical changes in the way things are.
Ross Kenyon: Making it real topical here, Kate. I can’t avoid it. Well, it’s March 25th right now. Why are you in your living room though?
Kate Knibbs: So my husband has a presumed case of COVID. I’m in Brooklyn. So the doctors that we’ve spoken with have just told us to stay put because they’re primarily only testing people who need to be hospitalized and they don’t want people with mild to moderate symptoms to come in unless they have respiratory issues. So we’re just in isolation now. Until he gets better and then I’ll have to wait for longer since I’ve been exposed. And so I’m on day eight and he’s still pretty sick. So I just don’t know when it’s going to end.
It’s been weird in general and it’s weird for me to be talking about climate change. Fiction and doomerism without bringing public health and pandemic doomerism into it actually at this point. Like in my article, I didn’t really talk about books or movies that were focused on viruses. And now I’m wondering if maybe I should have because maybe they’re not so distinct after all. I’m not sure.
Ross Kenyon: I’m not sure. Wow. I’m sorry to hear this. It sounds very stressful. You’re living your own personal dystopia. You’re effectively quarantined.
Kate Knibbs: Yes.
Ross Kenyon: A loved one of yours is ill. Maybe you’ll be ill too.
Kate Knibbs: Yes. They did tell me to brace myself, but I’ve been symptom-free, so I just have to hold tight and see what happens.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Wow. That’s... Heavy. Well, at least in your other comment in your last statement about the links between COVID-19 and climate change, I’ve seen lots and lots of takes on this. People are thinking about this. Yeah, I’m wondering, what is the connection, at least in terms of literature and media that’s being created? Are the similarities there? How might you begin to wrap your head around where these diverge or converge?
Kate Knibbs: Well, I think one thing that’s been made pretty clear is for a long time, cli-fi and speculative fiction that dealt with climate change didn’t really have it rooted so much in like this inevitable reality that we’re all living with. Like it was more actually speculative about what might happen. Whereas now, if you’re a writer dealing with climate change, you have to confront the fact that it is happening. And, you know, there’s a lot of great art about Imagined Pandemics. Station Eleven comes to mind. Is that a novel? Yeah, it’s a really great novel by Emily St.
Mandel, I believe. And they’re adapting it into either like a miniseries or a TV show. And it’s about people surviving after a virus wipes out the majority of humanity. And like Orcs and Crake also deals with climate change, but it also is set after a pandemic.
Ross Kenyon: That’s Margaret Atwood, right?
Kate Knibbs: Yes, there’s a lot of art speculative fiction that takes pandemics as like a jumping off point. And those have also, until very recently, felt speculative, not like something necessarily confronting a day-to-day reality that everyone is living in. And I think after the coronavirus outbreak this year, that’s going to change.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think we’re going to see a lot of media produced about this. I don’t think there’s any doubt about this. People are going to want to talk about it for a long time.
Kate Knibbs: Yes, and in different registers, I guess I’m trying to say, whereas before it was siphoned into genre fiction, now I think it’s going to be popping up everywhere, including in domestic realism and literary fiction and rom-coms. Because it’s just a part of the fabric of like our shared experience.
Ross Kenyon: Everyone wants to keep playing on the Gabriel Garcia Marquez love in the time of Corona. I keep saying that.
Kate Knibbs: Oh, yeah. I think Wired has like a decree that no one’s allowed to use that headline.
Ross Kenyon: I’m kind of sick of it, especially because I doubt that’s even been read by many of the users. And I’m gatekeeping, damn it. You stay away from him with your bad, bad adaptations. It’s like, I don’t really care.
Kate Knibbs: Yeah. Yeah. So hopefully that phrase will be outlawed soon.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, so I’m thinking about now literature or media about pandemics. The first thing I can think of is obviously zombies, right? But I’m like, okay, we’ve talked about this before on a previous episode. Surprisingly, this has come up before. But when I think about the George Romero sort of genre invention slash reinvention, you know, Night of the Living Dead, the Yeah. Yeah. Man, I’ve played the Telltale games of those. I’ve seen Fear of the Walking Dead, and I’ve read the graphic novels, and I’ve watched most of The Walking Dead. I don’t know what it’s trying to say, if anything.
It just sort of happens in this world, and zombies are in the back. But it’s sort of about this, like what happens when humans are in a state of nature and there isn’t this sort of like anarchy in the worst kind of way. But I don’t know what that has to teach me about pandemics. It’s just sort of like the environment rather than about zombies or viruses.
Kate Knibbs: I actually have never seen The Walking Dead. And now I feel like there’s too many seasons for me to go back and catch up on. But I definitely... I have read about zombies as a metaphor before. And have you read Severance by Ling Ma?
Ross Kenyon: You must know that every one of these books that you’re telling me about, I’ve been putting into my library app and just be like, that’s the next one. That’s the next one. Okay.
Kate Knibbs: So I was actually going to write about Severance in my Doom and Lit piece, but it’s about a pandemic. And so I decided to just Stick to Climate Change. Sorry that we’re talking mainly about pandemics that want to climate change.
Ross Kenyon: No, this is perfect. I’m loving it.
Kate Knibbs: Yes. So Severance, I believe it came out in 2019. It’s a really great novel about a young woman who lives in New York and there’s this pandemic. She is Chinese American. And so she goes back and forth between New York and Shenzhen. She’s in the Bible manufacturing industry. And this virus emerges that they call Shen Fever, and it sort of turns people into zombies. Their bodies start decomposing, and they just get stuck in behavioral loops until they die. And so this girl is basically... She joins a group of survivalists and they flee the city.
And I don’t need to spoil it like any more than that because you will like it. But it definitely is probably like the most on the nose read you could pick out right now because it does deal with like what pandemic looks like. Although it mashes up pandemic literature and like a zombie story. Art in an interesting way.
Ross Kenyon: As far as, you know, being fully in the zeitgeist, Station Eleven and Severance in my library app both have multiple month long wait lists. So probably should have put this on my list a while ago.
Kate Knibbs: I think, I think, did you hear that Contagion, like the Steven Soderbergh movie is, is like one of the most popular movies in America right now. Like, I think people are Are looking for things to read that speak to the moment.
Ross Kenyon: I’m surprised about that. There’s a great old movie. I think it’s from 50s. I might be wrong. Have you seen it’s called Sullivan’s Travels?
Kate Knibbs: No. What’s it about?
Ross Kenyon: So there’s this writer, director character who really wants to go and learn about poverty in America. And he wants to make a movie that’s like a very strong class consciousness, a very political film about Wealth distribution and capitalism. And he goes out and meets all these poor people. And they said, like, why don’t you make some more like swords and sandals, gladiators kind of movies? Like, we know what it’s like to be poor. It’s not good. You were helping. I wonder if that’s... Because of the topic or maybe because people aren’t commuting.
It hasn’t been performing as well. But I wonder if it’s also just we are not talking about COVID and we’re still talking about climate change. Is that what’s happening?
Kate Knibbs: Yeah. Maybe people can only hold so many crises in their heads at one moment.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. They don’t want to listen to us just banter about movies and books that we like. Come on, guys. We’re trying to bring a little levity to your life right now. You don’t want to just talk about sickness and fear. I don’t know. We try to be an optimistic podcast. Maybe we’re not giving people what they want. Maybe Sullivan’s Travels is just wrong. It’s totally possible thematically off base.
Kate Knibbs: I truly do not know. I’ve been trying to limit the amount of COVID content I consume. But that’s kind of tough because I’m covering it right now as a journalist. So it’s a little bit inescapable. But I will say that I really treasure the Non-COVID pieces of art I consume as much needed distractions.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I’ve been reading The Divine Comedy lately, although maybe tonally that’s also kind of grim. I’ve been reading a lot of travelogues too. Paul Theroux has been keeping me a bit buoyant, even though he’s such a crab. I don’t know if you’ve read that guy.
Kate Knibbs: Yeah, that makes sense to me why you would be searching that out because it’s like you can’t Travel right now. So it’s a nice sort of peek into a world that you don’t have access to at the moment. I think I’ve been watching a lot of Anthony Bourdain No Reservations episodes because they’re also so centered on place and it makes me feel like I’m getting out a little bit when I’m not able to leave this room.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. So I wonder if those numbers are up and also things about pandemics and epidemics and infection, and those are also up. So maybe it’s a two-pronged attack. Maybe there’s escapism side-by-side with staring directly into the oblivion.
Kate Knibbs: Yes. Yeah. And I wonder, when I wrote my piece about Doomer Lit, I didn’t know that this was coming. And I think I’ve sort of changed my mind or adjusted my stance on like what the appetite might be for a fatalism in art. Because I thought that weather would definitely appeal to a group of people that just want to read something that feels like a reflection of their anxieties. And I still think that’s true. But I also think, I don’t know. I don’t know that I necessarily want to read a realistic work of art that’s a reflection of my own anxieties now.
The way that I did a few months ago.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. My father-in-law is a doctor and he’s a big reader. And we talk about books all the time. And he just gave me this laundry list of books about the Spanish flu. And I’m just like, what? I don’t know that I need like seven of these books right now. Who’s it supposed to help exactly?
Kate Knibbs: Although I think reading a book about the Spanish flu or a book A book that puts it into historical context, like narrative nonfiction, would be preferable to reading a novel about someone’s psychological anguish during this time. I feel like that would be even tougher to stomach for me.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, at least with nonfiction, hopefully there’s a beginning, middle, and end. If the book is about anxiety, it’s just middle, right? You’re just sort of like there’s no resolution. So, okay, so that’s just maybe a structural thing about nonfiction that’s different. So I could see that. Okay, I’ll give the guy a break is what you’re trying to tell me.
Kate Knibbs: Well, I don’t think you’re under any obligation to read the books, but... I kind of get the drive to give yourself historical context.
Ross Kenyon: Cool. Yeah, I should do that. Although I might have to buy them because the library is just backed up on every book, you know, related to this is it’s long gone. Hey, sorry to interrupt. We’ve never done this before, but this is a mid-roll ad for our friends at Etitude. You may remember them from a bonus episode we did not too long ago where we talked with their founders, Kat and Phoebe, about the technology they use to turn bamboo, which is woody and rather hard, into betting that is quite It’s a cool show and always fun to peek inside of a business that is working at the intersection of what is good for the planet and what consumers actually want.
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Check out Etitude. com and use promo code Nori. And now back to the show. Well, one thing I wanted to ask you about too, Kate, is I got this insight. It’s not necessarily a totally fresh take. This is, you know, I think part of film criticism and has been for a long time, but I got this at least from Slavoj Zizek in A Pervert’s Guide to Cinema. He has a section where he’s in Bodega Bay and he’s talking about Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. And he says one of the ways to start to understand a horror film is to take the horror element out, take the monster out.
And what is the film exactly about? And so because he’s a sort of, you know, Lacanian, Freudian psychoanalysis geek, his take is that the birds are sort of this about Freudian psychosexual development and about the son and the girl trying to get together. But the mother is interfering in this in a sort of like incestuous Oedipal play. And that’s his take on that. But then there’s other examples too, like vampires are sort of these rich, elegant figures who are out in the countryside and they suck the blood of peasants out there.
So this is sort of about like aristocratic landlords and feudalists. Well, yeah.
Kate Knibbs: I think it’s hard to make a monster that symbolizes climate change. I think that’s when I was talking before about how Game of Thrones sort of mismanaged the White Walkers, I think that speaks to it. We don’t have sort of an archetype like the vampire or the zombie or what are other monsters?
Ross Kenyon: A brief side note, I think I got this from Jared Diamond or maybe it was Yuval Harari or one of those popular geographer guys about trolls. Trolls in fiction is about when humans or homo sapiens lived alongside Neanderthals and trolls are about Neanderthals.
Kate Knibbs: Yeah, I feel like we don’t necessarily have an archetype that represents our anxieties about climate change or about climate change. Like, I suppose, you know, there are a bunch of different names for, like, the Abominable Snowman. And... Maybe that, but it’s not like we’re consuming a bunch of... It’s not like there’s a few abominable snowman movies coming out in the same way that there tend to be a few zombie movies that come out each year.
Ross Kenyon: You know we have to unpack this though, Kate. So the function of the abominable snowman, clearly there must be some reason why this exists in terms of cultures that have produced it. Like why? What exactly is the abominable snowman trying to say to us in myth?
Kate Knibbs: Also called a Yeti. A Yeti, yeah. I think it’s sort of fear of the sublime majesty of nature, perhaps. I really don’t know. Like, I think it’s definitely a cultural totem about how you need to be careful going outside. But I don’t think that the Yeti and the Abominable Snowman really is about climate change. I just was thinking it’s the closest thing because it like lives in the cold.
Ross Kenyon: Now it’s becoming warm and he’s pissed and he’s coming out of the Himalayas to come get you.
Kate Knibbs: Yeah, I feel like there’s probably going to be some e-horror movie with that exact plot coming out soon. But yeah, so I don’t think that we’ve come up with metaphors that work on like a narrative level for climate change in the same way that we have for most other big problems that we face. I wonder if that’s just because it has a different scope than most of the other problems we face. I don’t want to sound like I’m minimizing all other societal ills because they’re obviously awful, but just the way that climate change impacts literally every single person and can often feel very hard to stop on an individual level.
I just think that it really resists metaphorically.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I could see a blanket of fog. Yeah, it does seem quite hard to personalize or make into this sort of allegorical superhero, supervillain. I’m sure as soon as we finish talking about this, Kate, we’re both going to realize like, oh, there it is.
Kate Knibbs: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: I don’t know. I mean, I’ve seen lots of people write about this and this is the classic conundrum of climate communication, which is why is this so hard to get across to people? I don’t know. I’m kind of stumped. I’m sorry. I wish I had something insightful to add there. Maybe you can sympathize with me there.
Kate Knibbs: No, I definitely, that’s something that I think we’re still struggling with. I do think that the fact that there are more Pieces of art that are explicitly grappling with like the psychological effects of climate change, like weather and First Reformed, an art that’s sort of willing to really sort of linger in the malaise it causes. That shows us that there are going to be new ways to talk about it. And maybe in the future, there will be a great monster genre that emerges. But I don’t know. Not now.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, not now. One other thing I worry about with Fiction or film or media in general. I had just read The Fire Is Upon Us, which is about James Baldwin and William F. Buckley’s debate at Cambridge in the 60s about race. I thought it was a really, really great book. And I was reminded of a piece that James Baldwin wrote criticizing the protest novel. And so much of his writing, he got in a big tiff with Richard Wright over this, where he It was critical of novels being written for a very clear didactic purpose to make a political point and how when art is forced to serve this political purpose, it takes away a lot of the life of it and the life in the broadest sense where this is A real multi-dimensional character and story with nuance as opposed to just a hero’s quest kind of thing.
And I feel pretty strongly about that. Granted, there are definitely cases of the protest novel or a political work of art that is beautiful in its own right and is fine. But I worry like someone trying to write a book about climate change rather than a book about flesh and blood humans during climate change. I don’t know. Do you worry that we lose some of the artistry when someone’s trying to write something like that? Or am I overthinking it?
Kate Knibbs: Well, not necessarily. I think that when you’re making a movie or writing a book and the moral message that you want to convey is the main thing that you’re prioritizing over narrative, then it’s probably going to suck. But... There has been a lot of wonderful art that would be considered protest novels or not necessarily a protest novel, but certainly a novel engaged with politics in a very tangible way. Like you were talking about Anna Karenina and, you know, it’s not like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were apolitical. So much great art has emerged from artists grappling with the politics of their day that I think the most important thing is that they don’t forget the other elements rather than that they have to not attempt to engage.
And also, like, when Baldwin was denouncing Richard Wright, he was denouncing Native Son, which I think is a good book.
Ross Kenyon: You know?
Kate Knibbs: It’s a good book, yeah. So... I do think it’s something that everyone should think about because nobody wants to read a book that feels like it’s a chore that’s scolding you and the characters are really one dimensional pulpits for the author’s point of view. Like that’s not good art. That’s like Ayn Rand, you know, like promoting individualism and libertarianism. No one wants that. And so it is, especially with climate change and environmentalists who are also artists and who really want their art to also make people think deeply about an issue that’s really important.
It’s something that we should certainly be considering seriously, but I don’t think that, I don’t think it’s impossible to write a great book that also has deep engagement with politics in a clear moral stance. It’s just hard to write a good book in general and to do both is doubly harsh.
Ross Kenyon: You’re totally spot on. There’s a beautiful, a beautiful, nice little set of statements in there. I do want to poke at the Tolstoy one a little bit. This is such a pretentious kind of question. Have you read War and Peace, Kate?
Kate Knibbs: I have not read War and Peace. I’m sorry to say I have read Anna Karenina, but that is the extent of my Tolstoy.
Ross Kenyon: Sorry, I’m like...
Kate Knibbs: Oh no, I read Death of Even a Leech in college, but that was like a decade ago. Yeah, like does War and Peace not confront the politics that Tolstoy was concerned with?
Ross Kenyon: It totally does. So it’s also a work of historical fiction. It’s about Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812, much before Tolstoy lived, many decades. And the book, there’s amazing characters in there that are very fleshy. But he also is making a political point, which is he’s critical of the great man theory of history. He’s sort of like, would the same thing would have happened without Napoleon? How responsible are individual great leaders? And he thinks the forces of history are much bigger than these individual actors. And so he’s critical of that historiography.
He’s also critical of Napoleon as a conqueror, as you might expect, etc. And the book works. But then the last book he wrote, the last large novel, I guess I should say, is called Resurrection. And it is super didactic. And I love the guy. But I don’t know if you’re familiar with Henry George, the political economist from the 19th century. But the whole book is about Georgism, essentially. Yeah. You’re just like, why are you telling me about George’s on this entire thing? There’s an apocryphal Samuel Goldwyn screenwriter quote where he says, if you want to send a message, try Western Union.
And some of those are more successful than others. I think what you said earlier, though, is the best way to say it. Your politics can be in a book in a very strong way, but it can’t overwhelm the artistry of just telling a good story with good characters. If you prioritize the second, it’s just not as good.
Kate Knibbs: No. And also, I don’t think It would be just a really depressing world if every piece of art had to have a moral message. I don’t think that’s necessarily the point. I’m fine with people whose work doesn’t always grapple with the big issue of the day because I feel like if you make some sort of prescriptive blanket sort of announcement, I don’t know. I just feel like the whole point of art isn’t to necessarily educate people. It can, but it shouldn’t have to.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I don’t know. Art can do all sorts of different things. And some of it might just be mood. I’m sure sometimes you want, I don’t know what your personal politics are, but I’m sure you have authors that when you read them, you get all fired up and you’re like, yeah, that’s how I feel about this. And other times you want maybe a little bit more nuance. Maybe you want someone to deal in the uncertainties and anxiety of a problem. I don’t know. You probably have a pretty complete bookshelf with things that scratch all sorts of different itches, right?
Kate Knibbs: Oh yeah, certainly. I think it’s important to read widely and to also sometimes read books that don’t necessarily elucidate your politics just to see what other people are saying. I’m not saying go read like a book that you find politically repugnant necessarily, but you know, I definitely try to make sure that I’m not just reading books that I agree with completely. But yeah, it’s an interesting moment right now, I feel, for climate fiction in general, for Doomer Lit, if that is a sub-genre that continues to exist just because. I do think it’s hard for people to focus on multiple disasters at once, and we are currently in one that is much more tangible.
I don’t know. I feel like maybe some people started writing Doomer works of art about climate change, and now all of their characters are dying of some really messed up disease instead. I don’t know. I’m sorry. I might be the most fatalistic guest you’ve had on your show, but in my defense, I think I’m probably also the only guest on your show that is talking to you from being confined to one room for several weeks.
Ross Kenyon: You’re not the most doer, but you’re also, you are the only one who’s been quarantined at the time of recording. That is absolutely unique. And we wish you well. I hope your husband and you recover and are safe. And hopefully by the time this airs, it’s not like everyone listening is in a much worse place than they are now too.
Kate Knibbs: Thank you. I really appreciate that. And we’re lucky that we’re both healthy and don’t have underlying issues. I think actually this is going to produce a lot of art and conversations just about public health in general, because we’re about to face a lot of issues with the healthcare system, like even more than we already have thus far. So it’s March 25th. I don’t know when this will air, but from what I understand, the healthcare system in several major cities is going to be overwhelmed. And that in itself will Grim prediction, but also seems plausible to me as well.
Well, Kate, you write about all sorts of things. And if someone wanted to keep up with your particular voice and your journalism, what’s a good place for them to do so? They can follow me on Twitter. My handle is just my last name, which is KNIBBS. I will warn you, though, that a lot of my tweets are really stupid. Or you can check me out. I’m a senior writer at Wired, so that’s really the only place I’m writing right now, except for a few freelance one-offs. So just Wired, you know, we’re really working around the clock to make sure that we’re covering climate change, the coronavirus, and just...
Yeah. Thanks for having me. I had a really good time talking to you and it really did make me forget that I forget my current circumstances.
Ross Kenyon: That’s good. No, I’m so happy you came on. I read your article and I knew that I had to try to get you on because books are amazing. I love books. Sounds like you also really love books. I want to talk about them. So I think this worked out well for all of us. Well, thanks, Kate. If you like this episode, there are links in the show notes to Kate’s work, her Twitter, etc. Thank you for being here, Kate.
Kate Knibbs: Thank you.
Ross Kenyon: Well, thank you so much for listening. If you like the show, please rate and review it in Apple Podcasts and or Stitcher. It really helps us a lot to get this content to a wider audience. If you think what we’re doing is useful, interesting, fun, hopefully all three, we’d certainly appreciate your rating and review. You can keep up with Nori at nori. com where there is a newsletter. That’s nori. com slash subscribe. There’s podcast. There’s a whole bunch else. Or you can send us an email at podcast at nori. com.
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