Jenny Offill’s novel is a comedy of a climate fiction novel. Offill begins her discussion by providing anecdotal moments within our narrator’s life. These moments, at first, go into some background about the actors within this novel. We meet Henry, a recovering addict that may have a chance at love, Eli, her son, and her husband, Ben, who seems to be a minor character designed for a set purpose. Through this we are introduced to Sylvia, her mentor and boss, controlling a “doomsday” podcast. It is through Offill’s novel, Weather, that the gap between environmentalists, doomsday preppers, and those integrated into the “everyday Anthropocene” comes together into a comedic interpretation of what it is like to live on a dying planet.

While our narrator’s job is to answer questions that come into Sylvia’s Hell and High Water, including many religious or climate fanatics claiming the end of the world is near or asking how to better prepare, we see her family and surrounding acquaintances living within the “everyday anthropocene”. Henry is starting a life and family with his partner Catherine. Ben is following politics. Eli is making friends at school. It seems that the setting for this novel is almost painstakingly ordinary. In Ghosh’s novel, The Hungry Tide, we watch the visitors to the tide country experience an ever changing landscape and fight for survival. Similarly, in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, we watch as a band of misfits come together to try to survive the country’s collapse into dystopia. Offill takes a more subtle approach, and perhaps a more effective one in describing an ordinary woman’s life that readers can imagine themselves in, thus creating a truer replica of the Anthropocene in Western countries.

At first, Lizzie, our beloved narrator, is content with making jokes and laughing at the crazy letters coming into her mailbox.  She says “‘ Environmentalists are so dreary,” or says that “ the hippie letters are a hundred times more boring than the end-timer ones,” (Offill, 51). Further in, however, she begins to wonder about the state of the world. Offill provides these small intervals in which politics interfere with Lizzie’s everyday life. She provides a moment in which Lizzie feels people are “sick of being lectured to about the glaciers,” and a man says to her “But what’s going to happen to the American weather?”( Offill, 73). This is a way that Offill can comedically remind readers that there are people out there simply concerned with the everyday Anthropocene. Not worried about our planet’s decline but how it will affect their day to day living. Yet as Lizzie answers these “hippie and end-timer letters” she begins to question her own everyday Anthropocene. After learning about “climate departure” and speaking to her husband about it, Ben, when asked what is new with Lizzie and him, states that “‘ Lizzie has become a crazy doomer,” ( Offill, 89).

The novel is sneaky in the way it reveals itself as a climate fiction novel. There are jokes about using antibacterial soap and Blue No. 1 dyes to make readers laugh about what is actually important. There are jokes about letting bills pile up with the punchline being “get organized or die”( Offill, 74). Offill provides a view of an everyday Anthropocene and then highlights the things that must be noticed to recognize that our planet is declining at a rapid rate. Offill’s novel does a great job of making fun of most people, yet never alienating anyone. Offill’s novel is climate fiction without relying on the usual tropes necessary to provide an introspective novel questioning our relationship to our planet. It bridges the gap between those fanatics that are either environmentalists, hippies, or end-timers with those who maybe think too much about the everyday, such as the character Catherine, or people concerned with antibacterial hand soap.

In Jenny Offill’s book titled Weather, there is a humorous approach to climate fiction that is both creative and effective. Unlike Ghosh, who relied on the uncanny, or Octavia Butler, who depended on speculation, Offill sets her main character up as an actress within “the everyday Anthropocene”. She takes an interesting and humorous approach to climate and world issues, allowing her main character to make jokes about the end of the world. Offill’s fiction is creatively done and approaches the issue in a unique way. Offill sets up a main character working in a library. The woman in question has societal duties that extend to her children, family, and husband. While the main character takes a humorous approach to issues regarding end of the world speculation and politics, readers are able to laugh along at the state of the world.

Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower is a science fiction novel that details the collapse of society. Against Ghosh, who believes that science fiction is not an effective way to speak about climate change because of its doomsday ideas, Butler writes a piece that is set in 2025 in a development called Robledo. In Butler’s work, there is the Earthseed religion and mutual aid that brings people together to save or perhaps simply survive this apocalyptic event. This approach allows the novel to tell a story, one of relative success, within the genre of climate fiction. Butler’s speculative fiction contrasts Ghosh’s realistic fiction, yet neither does something similar to Jenny Offill’s Weather.

In Ghosh’s work, there is a juxtaposition of indigenous people with values within their community, and more Western individuals who have Western beliefs operating within the unfamiliar community. Nayar connects this to indigenous canny and the uncanny. From this lens, Ghosh and Nayar speak on the details provided that give a sense of uncanny such as the ever changing landscape and the wild wildlife present in the tide country. We see individuals like Piya and Kanai coming across the uncanny in the form of crocodiles, tigers, and muddy rivers. These individuals are juxtaposed with the character Fokir, who grew up in the tide country and feels more at home on the water than in his home on land. Ghosh also sets up a comparison between humans versus animals. In this he pits environmentalists attempting to displace refugees to save wildlife, with people who have nowhere to go and need a home. With this juxtaposition, readers are able to see the boundary and belief system that the uncanny and indigenous canny operate behind regardless of conflict. In the end the uncanny becomes canny for Piya and Kanai as they create a project in honor of Fokir. This approach with realistic fiction is successful and effective for readers to consider these two points of view and attempt to understand Ghosh’s implications. Ghosh’s fiction differs from Offill’s based upon this idea of the uncanny. He depends upon the uncanny to tell a story outside of the everyday Anthropocene, while Offill creates a world within this Western everyday life.

Offill’s work is quite different because a significant portion is almost humorous. While in all three novels there is a clear threat to the planet, Offill’s work attempts to poke fun at the everyday while our planet declines slowly. The main character produces humor within small brief glimpses into her life. Her mentor, Sylvia, runs a podcast talking about essentially the end of the world. While the main character introduces humorous moments, there is also an underlying dread of our worlds’ decline (As I write this I have an underlying dread based upon the election results). Sylvia gives talks on evolution in which she says “ the only reason we think humans are the height of evolution is that we have chosen to privilege certain things above other things,” (Offill, 46). This is followed by a lighthearted comparison of the things humans do not measure against animals that is designed to make readers chuckle and think. Offill creates an interesting approach to climate fiction that is unlike that of Butler or Ghosh. It seems that while Butler and Ghosh were arguing about the value of science fiction as a genre, Offill produced a type of comedy piece surrounding climate change.

In his book, The Hungry Tide, Ghosh sets up a nuanced view of nature versus man. The setting is Lusibari and its surrounding islands that make up the tide country. Piya, an American cetologist, is set on discovering and mapping the habits of a rare species of dolphin that used to roam the tide country. The story follows another young man named Kanai who is coming to read Nirmal’s diary of sorts that follows a settlement on an island close to Lusibari. Through this narrative Ghosh is able to convey the idea of nature versus humans.

Ghosh begins with a seemingly innocent approach with Piya’s point of view, noticing that there has been a drop in wildlife in the tide country. Piya goes to great lengths to convey that this area used to be a home to many different creatures. She admires how in tune with nature her guide, Fokir,by saying “But that’s how it is in nature, you know: for a long time nothing happens, and then there’s a burst of explosive activity and it’s over in seconds. Very few people can adapt themselves to that kind of rhythm – one in a million I’d say. That’s why it was so amazing to come across someone like Fokir,” (Ghosh, 221). This shared mindset that she believes Fokir and her have towards nature ends when Fokir and her come across a village dealing with a tiger. Piya comes away from the experience distraught as Fokir pulls her away from the angry mob setting the tiger on fire. Kanai translates what Fokir thinks about the villagers killing wildlife by saying “‘ He says that when a tiger comes into a human settlement, it’s because it wants to die,” (Ghosh, 244). After the tiger incident Piya confides in Kanai that he may have been right about her and Fokir’s communication. She felt that there was a very clear misunderstanding between them.

This conflict between man and nature comes to a head in an argument between Piya and Kanai. Piya’s point of view is informed by both her American upbringing and Kanai’s is informed by what his reading of Nirmal’s diary. Kanai begins by bringing up the fact that the tiger had killed two people from the village and that there was horror beyond the tiger being killed. “If there were killings on that scale anywhere else on earth it would be called a genocide, and yet here it goe almost unremarked: these killings are never reported, never written about in the papers. And the reason is just that these people are too poor to matter. We all know it, but we choose not to see it. Isn’t that a horror too- that we can feel the suffering of an animal, but not of human beings?” (Ghosh, 248). Not only does Kanai’s statement relate to many authors’ perspectives we have read regarding slow violence or even the “everyday Anthropocene”, but he calls Piya and himself out as “complicit” in this dynamic. Piya, and those like her studying adn attempting to preserve wildlife, have not had regard for the human costs. Kanai, and the other people of his class are complicit in “hiding the costs … to curry favor with their Western patrons,” (Ghosh, 249).It is this argument between Piya and Kanai that illustrates Ghosh’s sentiments about humans versus nature. 

Another view on the subject is loosely roped in. This point of view is from Nirmal, a poet and school teacher that became fascinated or inspired by a settlement near his island. For Nirmal nature and man both have their places in the world as he believes in a version of vital materialism: “For hum it meant that everything which existed was interconnected: the trees, the sky, the weather, people, poetry, science, nature. He hunted down facts in the way a magpie collects shiny things. Yet when he strung them all together, somehow they did become stories-of a kind,” (Ghosh, 233). Perhaps that is the kind of story Ghosh is attempting to create as he writes this novel about climate and the humans that inhabit the world. Ghosh sets up this narrative and keeps readers at the edge of their seats as they attempt to decipher the meaning as well as the ideal outcome of this relationship between humans inhabiting land, perhaps even calling it home, and the animals, weather, tides, or simply nature itself, that inhabited the land before them.

In Amitav Ghosh’s “The Great Derangement”, he speaks on climate fiction and what modes of presentation are necessary. In this piece, he denotes science fiction and speculative fiction to what he calls “the literary outhouse”. He feels that providing a dystopian narrative based on survival may not call enough attention to the climate events happening during the present period. While Octavia Butler’s novels do not align with his critique of the genre, there is merit in his own fictional accounts of climate change. Ghosh’s novel “The Hungry Tide” is a climate fiction novel set in the present that explores not only what to do in a great disaster such as the one that falls upon fictional Robledo, but how to coexist with nature.

The novel’s setting allows the reader to see the dangers of nature. There are tigers and giant crocodiles existing alongside the humans inhabiting the territory. One of the subjects the novel follows is Piya, an American marine biologist interested in researching rare, or now rare, dolphin species. She rides along with two unnamed individuals until she encounters a strange fisherman. While traveling with this man, Fokir, she encounters the dolphin species and begins to track their habits. Ghosh is an extremely strong writer who captures moments of epiphany for both his characters as well as his readers. It seems that Ghosh is able to fictionalize the idea of vital materialism successfully. In the story, Piya and Fokir cannot communicate through language but must rely on human nature and body language to convey their ideas to each other. Piya is surprised by this mode of communication and Ghosh says “The two of them, Fokir and she, could have been boulders or trees for all they knew of each other….more honest, that they could not speak? For if you compared it to the ways in which dolphins’ echoes mirrored the world, speech was only a bag of tricks that fooled you into believing that you could see through the eyes of another being,” (Ghosh, 132). Ghosh’s work is poetic but there are moments like this in his writing in which you can see both what the character is thinking and how the writing serves the story, yet the statement transcends what the story is saying and speaks to the nature of humans and their ways of relating to each other or the world around them in a more general sense.

Ghosh goes further towards humans relating to the world around them when he provides the symbiotic relationship that Piya witnesses between the Orcaella and the fishermen. She sees the dolphins drive fish into the fishing nets and then feast on the leftover fish. In this example, Ghosh is setting the reader up for a look into how and in what ways we can work with nature rather than consuming it or actively working against it. While this story may not entertain in the same vein of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, it provides perhaps more depth into how we exist on this planet and how we could work on coexistence more. Towards the end of the assigned reading, we see a society built by refugees content with living with the planet. Nirmal is amazed in his journals at what these people have done so that they may live in such a naturally dangerous place in harmony with nature. The realistic nature of this novel, and the fact that it is not set further into the future after or during disaster, shows the impact of Nixon’s slow violence, yet still removes the reader from LeMenager’s everyday anthropocene, allowing readers to wonder what it may be like to live in a symbiotic relationship with the planet rather than a predatory impulse to take what we can.

When examining the beliefs of Donna Harroway, the concept of “learning to die” that LeMenager speaks about crosses with Ghosh’s argument for a turn towards collectivism as a society. Harroway’s critique of scholars naming a time period the anthropocene, given that the period we are in should not and does not only include the human species, is a diverging point from what LeMenager would describe as the everyday anthropocene. Harroway finds fault in LeMenager’s talk of “the everyday Anthropocene”. LeMenager goes on to imply “the present tense, lived time of the Anthropocene, and I recommend paying attention to what it means to live, day by day, through climate shift and the economic and sociological injuries that underwrite it,” (LeMenager, 6).  The general idea of the anthropocene fallacy that Harroway argues against appears in the same paragraph as LeMenager writes; “Epochs are time monuments, attaching us- by ‘us’ here I mean those elite humans who identify ourselves with world authorship,” (LeMenager, 6). Harroway would disagree with this broad statement placing humans above, if not in charge or control of, the climate crisis.

In contrast to LeMenager’s idea of “The Anthropocene” and the centering of humans as the primary actors in the Anthropocene, Harroway deepens the idea of what it means for all species as we watch our planet decline, as well as the factors that have had a large role in creating this “Anthropocene”. Harroway argues that “ I along with others think the Anthropocene is more a boundary event than an epoch,” (Harroway, 2). She goes on to coin a new term for the geological period our Earth has entered into, one with meaning for both the human species occupying Earth, but one also including the number of other species present and seeking unavailable refuge. She attempts to name the “dynamic ongoing sym-chthonic forces and powers of which people are a part, within which ongoingness is at stake,” (Harroway, 2). She calls the epoch “the Chthulucene—past, present, and to come,” (Harroway, 2). She goes on to argue for humans to “make kin” in order to think with a more collective mindset on preserving what is, for what could be next. She means this in the context of humans, yet also the other countless species facing challenges due to climate change.

In Ghosh’s “The Great Derangement”, the end of the article has a similar idea of progress to Harroway’s ideas. Both authors argue and insist that to combat this geological boundary and make this time period shorten, or better yet, resolve, is to abandon Western-individualism and move towards a sort of collectivism. When reading Ghosh, it is convincing that humans should participate in this collective awareness and fight to save or preserve what is going to be lost from climate change. It is Harroway that takes it a step further and encourages humans to not only make kin with each other but with respective species and forces that are also present and suffering on Earth.