A Novel That Imagines a World Without Bees
Maja Lunde’s climate-fiction debut uses species extinction to ask its human characters: What’s more important, self-interest or sacrifice?
The category of literature known as climate fiction—“cli-fi,” as it’s known—has gotten quite crowded in recent years. Even just in the past six months, there’s been Paul Kingsnorth’s Beast, which remains hopeful about impending disaster; Lesley Nneka Arimah’s short story “What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky,” which tackles both ecological concerns and the refugee crisis; and Ashley Shelby’s South Polewhich takes on . Into this busy field enters Maja Lunde’s novel . Lunde, a writer of children’s and young-adult books, pieces together a tale that makes the long-term effects of climate change the backdrop for a set of storiesabout familial relationships, love, and loss.
