Stephanie Jane reviewed Uncanny and Improbable Events by Amitav Ghosh (Green Ideas, #6)
My favourite of the Green Ideas books
5 stars
Penguin's 'Green Ideas' series is a new publication of twenty short books each written by an eminent environmental thinker and focusing on different aspects of our planet's environmental crisis. I am grateful to Penguin for sending me review copies of five of these works and, on the strength of what I have read so far, I look forward to completing the set myself.
In the most thought-provoking, for me personally, Green Ideas books I have so far read, Amitav Ghosh asked the intriguing question of why there is practically no inclusion of climate change scenarios in our literary fiction. This is, after all, the biggest disaster that will engulf - and possibly eliminate - humankind, yet its spectre remains conspicuously absent from any serious novels, relegated instead to the realms of science fiction, speculative fiction and its own specific genre, climate fiction. I hadn't really considered before why science and …
Penguin's 'Green Ideas' series is a new publication of twenty short books each written by an eminent environmental thinker and focusing on different aspects of our planet's environmental crisis. I am grateful to Penguin for sending me review copies of five of these works and, on the strength of what I have read so far, I look forward to completing the set myself.
In the most thought-provoking, for me personally, Green Ideas books I have so far read, Amitav Ghosh asked the intriguing question of why there is practically no inclusion of climate change scenarios in our literary fiction. This is, after all, the biggest disaster that will engulf - and possibly eliminate - humankind, yet its spectre remains conspicuously absent from any serious novels, relegated instead to the realms of science fiction, speculative fiction and its own specific genre, climate fiction. I hadn't really considered before why science and speculative fiction are sidelined in this way. All fiction is imagined so who decided that this particular branch of imagination is less worthy?
Ghosh brings together threads from a number of other books I've read over the past few years and, as regular readers of my reviews will know, I love it when books coalesce in this way. From the mini climate breakdown of 1816 in The Year Without Summer by Guinevere Glasfurd to the ludicrous siting of the Fukushima Power Plant discussed in My Nuclear Nightmare by Naoto Kan, advised against by medieval Japanese 'build nothing below this line' stone markers, he connects disparate ideas to build up a convincing narrative of the way in which Western thought particularly has moved away from an acknowledgement of ourselves within nature to extensions of the arrogant Enlightenment philosophies that put man above nature and, therefore, fully able to control her.
Uncanny And Improbable Events is probably my favourite of the Green Ideas books I've so far read because of its unique angle on the unfolding climate change we see across the globe and our seeming inability to fully conceive what we have wrought.
