Tarun K Saint and Francesco Verso’s ecologically focused speculative fiction anthology Ecoceanic: Southern Flows is an excellent addition to the growing body of English language publications of speculative fiction from the Global South. In the last five years, works from non-western science fiction and speculative fiction traditions – including diasporic authors – have become available to English language readers.
Collections like the two-volume New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color (2019) and New Suns 2: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color (2023) edited by Nisi Shawl and Africa Risen (2022) edited by Sheree Renée Thomas, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, and Zelda Knight, novels such SB Divya’s Meru (2023) and Tade Thompson’s Far from the Light of Heaven (2021), alongside movies like The Wandering Earth (China, 2019) and Kalki 2898 AD (India, 2024) have justifiably demanded the attention of the global readers and viewers. Among many of these works the dire issue of climate change and its concomitant dangers have stood out prominently.
Climate change and socio-economic injustices
Although in The Great Derangement (2016) Amitav Ghosh claimed that literature has not done enough to foreground climate change and its effects, science and speculative fiction have kept the issue front and centre for a long time. This is especially true of the works of the last decade, which have strongly emphasised political and socio-economic injustices and adverse effects related to a changing climate pattern in the poorer parts of the world. Ghosh’s recent publications Gun Island (2019) and The Living Mountain (2022) prominently employ speculative and fantastic devices and are great examples of such works. Saint and Verso’s anthology not only neatly fits into this pattern but also enriches the tradition of climate-focused speculations.
Ecoceanic comes from two editors who have shown a sustained commitment to bringing global science and speculative fiction, especially non-hegemonic works, to the forefront. While Saint’s previous anthologies, the two-volume Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction (2019 and 2021), Avatar (2020), and Kalicalypse (2022), showcase science fiction from South Asia (including translations from other languages), Verso’s Future Fiction publication has been consistently publishing speculative fiction from all around the world over the last decade.
A commitment towards climate change awareness is also apparent in their works. Verso’s collection Ecoluzione (2023) and his co-edited (with Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay) Meteotopia: Futures of Climate (In)Justice (2022) take ecology and climate change as central concerns and Saint’s previous collections include stories that take environment as a major focus. Ecoceanic’s attention is squarely on the Global South and on the politics of water in its broadest sense. In his introduction, Saint says this collection reflects the “imaginative responses to this [climate] crisis from the vantage point of the Southern Hemisphere”. The stories come mostly from “formerly colonised countries” in Africa, South Asia, South America, and Australia, that is, from the spaces that suffer the consequences of climate catastrophes the most, and thus consciously present perspectives counter to the hegemonic speculative representations. Additionally, as the title indicates, the ocean features as the central image of this emerging future, as a threat as well as an ambiguous refuge.
Resistance and resistors
The collection opens with a poem “The New Frontier” by Kaiser Haq (Bangladesh) that is perhaps best seen as a satirical commentary on human disruption and devastation of the natural world as well as a philosophical overview of the anthology itself. Along with the apt introduction by Saint that underlines the necessity of fictional writing to address climate change, Haq’s poem sets the tone for the rest of the anthology. Likewise, the inclusion of a poem in an anthology like this should also be underscored. This commitment to non-traditional storytelling in a science fictional context is further apparent in Priya Sarukkai Chabria’s poem “I Had a Dream.” This poetic monologue, perhaps by the sea itself, utilises both prose and verse forms to reflect on an evolving relationship between the ocean and humans. Using scientific terminology and mythological allusions, this piece navigates both realities and speculative meditations regarding the rising oceans.
Although such non-normative works add a flair to the anthology, its strength comes from more traditional (science fiction) storytelling. In many instances, extrapolation becomes the primary device for such a purpose. Soham Guha’s (a bilingual author from India who publishes in both Bangla and English) “Mare Tranquillitatis,” set in the coastal areas of the Bay of Bengal, foregrounds not only the Indian attitude towards a world with changing weather patterns and rising sea level but also the role of corporate greed in fostering such change. The story provides an instance of resistance by small actors against giant corporations along with speculations about evolutionary processes within marine life and how that can start a new era of competition with humans.
South African author Sam Beckbessinger’s “Undercurrency,” set off the southern coast of Africa, has a similar undertone of hope as it explores ways of utilising governmental and private sector resources to make a more sustainable future amidst large-scale climate crises. In this story about sea farming and love, evolutionary processes among sea creatures play a key role, although not in a drastic way as in Guha’s work. “Shroud and the Moon” by Australian writer Thoraiya Dyer utilises two parallel narrative threads in putting anthropogenic concerns in perspective of the geological scale of the Earth and its evolution. While one storyline shows a bleak future of humanity fighting over resources in a world drowning under the oceans from weather catastrophes, another thread explores the myriad non-human consciousnesses evolving and unfolding over eons after the earth turns into a water-world.
While these stories ponder the interconnectedness of environmental and biospheric transformations, others center on the economics of climate change more prominently. Australian writer Eugene Bacon’s “The Water Runner” brings together class and political despotism in a future desertified Tanzania, where water harvesting from dead bodies economically sustains part of the population. In this gruesome, corrupt, and water-starved state, resembling many postcolonial African countries, the poor population is fodder for powerful politicians and greedy companies alike. Sri Lankan writer Vajra Chandrasekara offers a hallucinatory account of a drowning world, where the water stops just short of the wealthy compounds in “Half-Eaten Cities.” While such a deluge eats up both human and non-human habitats and makes the poorer population adapt to their new reality, the truly wealthy remain out of harm’s way. This no wonder is a strong indictment of the inequality in climate change misfortune.
A couple of stories in the anthology offer interesting explorations of the relationship between humans and Earth as a habitat. Although set in a similar dystopian future as in the works above, “Hope at the End of the World” by Nigerian writer Chinaza Eziaghighala offers a possibility of redemption through technological innovation. In this postapocalyptic earth where sea and land have changed places, human life is possible only within ecological domes. The story ends with the solution of leaving Earth for a new habitable planet. This work is in a way a planetary take on the idea of climate refugees.
Conversely, Peruvian writer César Santiañez in “I Speak with a Thousand Voices” (translated from Spanish) highlights the connection between the land and its inhabitants and efforts to make the earth habitable by combining new scientific developments and ancient wisdom of indigenous cultures. This story is a stringent criticism of Oil companies’ roles in water pollution, destruction of natural wealth, and exploitation of the indigenous population.
Perhaps the most outstanding story of this collection, Indian writer Vandana Singh’s “The Word for World is Ocean,” is not set on Earth at all, but rather on a faraway moon almost entirely covered in ocean. Consequently, here the attitude of thought experiment is more prominent than the device of extrapolation like in most of the other works. Evoking Ursula K Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest (1972) in its title, this story meticulously creates a marine ecosystem, illustrates a harmonious (both biological and ideological) inter-species relationship, and corporate and imperialistic threats to such existence. Although not explicitly connected, this story seems to continue some of the conversations regarding immigration, climate, science, and imperialism that started in Singh’s 2008 novella Distances.
As Saint says in his introduction, these “imaginative counter-narratives that de-centre the exclusively human and techno-sphere-oriented viewpoint as a mode of Oceanic futurism from the Global South may enable a renewed critical look at the dilemmas and challenges we collectively face as planetary beings”. Notably, despite the dystopian prospects of a climate-altered future that these stories deal with, we are more often than not offered glimpses of hope – not in the maintenance of a status quo but in imagining possible alternatives to doom. Bringing together established names and new talents to speculate about perhaps the most pressing issue of our time, Ecoceanic is eminently readable and thought-provoking.
Suparno Banerjee is a Professor of English at Texas State University.
Ecoceanic: Southern Flows, edited by Tarun K Saint and Francesco Verso, Future Fiction.
