The Great Derangement (2017)

By Amitav Ghosh

176pp, Non fiction

Notes

2023-01-06

I have things to say about Amitav Ghosh’s Great Derangement. ... short version he acknowledges that sci-fi is treated as a ghetto to which fiction about climate change is often relegated but fails to recognize that it’s a ghetto that, on the whole, sells a while lot more that the literary fiction “mainstream”. In short, it’s literary fiction which is the dead end and as JG Ballard clocked half a century ago it’s genre fiction which addresses the real world

here the long version

In The Great Derangement — Climate Change and the Unthinkable Amitav Ghosh’s sets himself an interesting question, one which I think we do need to reckon with (and not just wrt climate change); at a societal level why are we creatively bankrupt when it comes imagining solutions to climate change (or even, at some level, perceiving the problem)?

But! The book is hamstrung by Ghosh’s reluctance to deal with science fiction as legitimate literature. He recognises that the things he wishes for in “mainstream” literature are often present in sci-fi (generational/ civilisational time spans, geological and climatological change, science & engineering considered as engines of human change etc. etc.) but refuses to countenance the idea that this stuff has any value or could be taken on its own terms. It’s infuriating. I was reminded of the Brian Aldiss’s poem (which I can’t seem to dig out) the gist of which is “if it’s good then it’s not SF” so Margret Atwood and Barbara Kingsolver’s works are admitted in to literature but nothing much beyond that. Ghosh is, like many of his fellow mainstream writers, blind to the idea that literary realism is a genre too *.

Sci-fi and fantasy have been dealing with multi-generational civilisational crises for decades now. There are hundreds if not thousands of books stretching back to The Time Machine that take long periods of time and our responsibilities towards the future seriously. I guess what I’m getting at is that at a societal level we do have the imaginative tools we need to deal with climate change but in much the same way that political orthodoxy prevents us from doing what we must eventually do, the literary orthodoxy which Amitav Ghosh represents acts as a gate keeper to the kind of imaginative strides we need to make in order to move forward. Literary conservatism supports political conservatism, which is part of Ghosh’s argument, but he’s unable to see that his genre gatekeeping is big part of the problem, he’s the conservative.

Aside: On the very first page it’s asserted that Star Wars takes place in the future, it doesn’t of course, it famously take place “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…” the fact that neither Ghosh nor his editors nor his proof reader noticed this glaring error on the first page of the book (or didn’t care to correct it if they did) illustrates the systemic bias that exists in the literary world against the fantastic imagination.

A frustrating book.

* In fact I think it can be argued (and has been argued pretty convincingly by Adam Roberts) that fantastic fiction is the thing that’s not a genre (except in modern publishing / marketing terms obv) but rather the default mode of human story telling.