The BSFA have posted my review of Eliva Wilk’s essay collection Death by Landscape on their website; the review first appeared in BSFA Review 19.
It’s an interesting collection; reading it made me want to re-read her novel Oval, which I also enjoyed (enough to pick it for my mock Clarke shortlist) but never wrote about. Anyway, here’s an excerpt from the review:
What the collection is actually about is environmental and ecosystems fiction, particularly its weird and uncanny variants, and as such it can be shelved honourably alongside books like Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement (2016) or Mark Bould’s The Anthropocene Unconscious (2021) as an attempt to understand how culture is responding to the climate crisis. Wilk is more wide-ranging than Ghosh and more incisive than Bould, and ultimately, also more informal (and indeed more fannish) than either, as in the latter stages the essays become somewhat more personal, and consider Wilk’s processes for her own fiction, notably her near-future novel Oval (2019, but published for the first time in the UK this year by Peninsula Press), as well as her situation during lockdown. But I was most struck by how the way Wilk thinks and writes about the environment cuts across the literary landscape as we currently understand it and starts to generate its own sense of community. It’s a commonplace experience, these days, to find an individual trope, like time travel or the multiverse, becoming part of our general culture, but this is something more: the way Wilk groups the works she discusses is simply a different way of organising information, like choosing to divide the spectrum of visible light into different slices than the rainbow we typically use.
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