Connecting to the physical environment and bringing it to the story is central in Disappearing Earth, even though the novel itself is about child kidnapping, racism, misogyny, and other social crises/crimes that may be just as hard to write “about” as climate change, but which Julia succeeds at expertly. The beauty of eco-fiction is that natural landscape can strongly shape and motivate the story, which can be vividly magnetized to the geography, seas and rivers, forests, and local biome surrounding the human activity within.
She elaborated later that climate change was not a motivation for writing her novel other that in a general sense these characters live in our real world in which climate change, war, hardship, and so on exist. Pitchaya Sudbanthad, Octavia Butler, Barbara Kingsolver, Margaret Atwood, Claire Vaye Watkins, and Jeff VanderMeer all come to mind. I think it’s hard to write a novel in general! But there are brilliant novelists who are writing all about climate change with enormous insight and skill. When I spoke with Julia about this, I asked her if she thought it was hard to write “about” climate change, and she said:
I read about the novel in Michigan Daily, where writer Emily Yang spent the first paragraph talking about novels about climate change and the difficulty of writing about them. Disappearing Earth was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2019 and a national bestseller, among other accolades. It was a pleasure to chat with Julia Phillips about her debut novel Disappearing Earth, the first edition of which was published by Knopf in May 2019. This month’s spotlight goes to a country not showcased before in the world eco-fiction series: Russia, specifically the Kamchatka peninsula, which dips down from the far eastern coastline of the country and lies between the Sea of Okhotsk and the Bering Sea. Adam Kirsch, The Global Novel: Writing the World in the 21st Century The local gains dignity, and significance, insofar as it can be seen as a part of a worldwide phenomenon. Life lived here is experienced in its profound and often unsettling connections with life lived elsewhere, and everywhere.
In this way, it is faithful to the way the global is actually lived–not through the abolition of place, but as a theme by which place is mediated. The global novel exists, not as a genre separated from and opposed to other kinds of fiction, but as a perspective that governs the interpretation of experience.
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