Monday, March 10, 2008

Climate Change - heating up the fiction of the future. . .

Ian McEwan fans can get a sneak peek into the subject of his next novel through a recent interview he did with The Sydney Morning Herald (thanks to Bookninja for the link)
According to the article, McEwan will be tackling climate change: "The way to write about climate change is to write about a deeply flawed person", he's quoted as saying.
The plot of book is outlined thus: Michael Beard, his protagonist, is a thrice-divorced womaniser and winner of the Nobel Prize for physics, a specialist in light who has made "planetary stupidity" his business and believes solar energy can save the world.

We've had tons of recent climate change non-fiction books - now watch for it to be the new hot topic tackled by our fiction writers. It appears as a subtle theme running through Meg Rosoff's latest, What I Was, and pops up in Adam Thorpe's latest novel Between Each Breath as well. One the best and funniest takes on "planetary stupidity" I've read recently is Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods which we'll be publishing in April. It's part sci-fi, part social satire, part love story (involving robots) and very much about our relationship and responsibilities to the environment, as we follow a group of space travellers trying to colonize a new planet, when our own has been destroyed. Great storytelling, lots of fun to read, and provocative but non-preachy. Would work well for YA readers too.

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