Fantasy and Myth in the Anthropocene: Imagining Futures and Dreaming Hope in Literature and Media ed. by Marek Oziewicz, Brian Attebery, and Tereza Dědinová

Abstract

Reviewed by: Fantasy and Myth in the Anthropocene: Imagining Futures and Dreaming Hope in Literature and Media ed. by Marek Oziewicz, Brian Attebery, and Tereza Dědinová Anita Tarr (bio) Fantasy and Myth in the Anthropocene: Imagining Futures and Dreaming Hope in Literature and Media. Edited by Marek Oziewicz, Brian Attebery, and Tereza Dědinová. Bloomsbury Academic, 2002. "Making teenagers depressed is like shooting fish in a barrel," opines Bart Simpson. Similarly, discussing climate change is bound to bring on despair, and so we might expect a book focused on the relationship of fiction and the environmental crisis to be full of doom and gloom. The popularity of young adult novels and futuristic films posed as warnings for a Hell on Earth becomes problematic, says Nisi Shawl, in "that they're sometimes used as blueprints" (26). Our pervasive Westernized stories prevent us from seeing beyond our beliefs of "human exceptionalism … human entitlement … and human identity"; we refuse to accept culpability or we become inured to the warnings, paralyzed by our helplessness to enact meaningful change. Fortunately, Fantasy and Myth in the Anthropocene: Imagining Futures and Dreaming Hope in Literature and Media takes a different path. Instead of casting readers into the swamp of despair, the contributors emphasize the importance of emphasizing hope for the future. The best way of transmitting this hope, they claim, is through counterstories, especially fantasy. Brian Attebery states in his essay, "From the Third Age to the Fifth Season: Confronting Anthropocene Through Fantasy," that "we need stories to tell us how we got here, where we are going, and how to live in the human-created world" (18). At this point I want to cheer out loud, not just because of the radical view that we can envision a future that is hopeful, but that stories—not just government policies, political grandstanding, and (sometimes-contested) statistics—are a vital factor in envisioning not the conquest of nature but a future "focused on cultivating livable collaboration" (214). "Stories can turn very complex matters into something intelligible, into something we recognize and can relate to. Stories and characters convey importance to things, persons, and places," bringing much-needed attention to climate change (227). [End Page 424] Another radical departure for Fantasy and Myth in the Anthropocene is that the contributors are scholars as well as creative writers, so that we read analysis in addition to poetry or reflective pieces. The editors, Marek Oziewicz, Brian Attebery, and Tereza Dědinová, have divided the sixteen analytical essays and the fifteen creative, inspirational pieces into four broad sections—"Trouble in the Air," "Dreaming the Earth," "Visions in the Water," and "Playing with Fire"—the traditional four elements of nature, each of which is introduced by Attebery's simplistic myth of human presence as "Child" wreaking havoc upon the world. Every essay is complemented by an inspirational piece that sometimes dramatizes the same basic topic or intensifies it or makes it more personal. For example, John Rieder's essay "Kim Stanley Robinson's Case for Hope in New York 2140" explains that Robinson "rewrites the myth of the Flood as a fantasy of successful anti-capitalist collective action" (146); the following reflective piece, Adam Gidwitz's "Myth Makes Us See," proposes that we should choose connection over comfort: "We do not need parables about an Earth destroyed. We need stories that wake ourselves to ourselves" (149). All this testifies to the editors' vision of producing a text that appeals to different aspects of readers' interests in their efforts to persuade us all to envision the future with hope, not despair. Although a couple of essays are unnecessarily challenging, all of the essays are edifying and enlightening. The texts being analyzed include Game of Thrones and its conflicted messages of climate change; the "magical connection" between humans and Nature (89), as conveyed in both Terry Pratchett's novels about witches and Margaret Mahy's focus on trees; N. K. Jemison's questionable return to the city as redemption; J. K. Rowlings's Wizarding World, a mind-scape that demonstrates "the process of a restoration ecology" (107); and fantasy television shows such as Steven Universe that thematize queer ecology. The reflective pieces are uneven...