After the Wave

Climate change is already here, woven into the mundane and the everyday. This conversation on the novel Under Water explores what literary fiction can capture about the natural world that dystopian “cli-fi” often cannot. It touches on the limits and possibilities of fiction when it comes to representing the environment, climate change, and grief.

The novel moves between two large-scale disasters, but it lingers longest on something smaller: the slow, gradual, often invisible changes to local ecosystems, what critic Rob Nixon called “slow violence.” In The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh…