GRAY clouds hang low overhead as Gina Chung and I meet for a walk in Brooklyn, New York’s Prospect Park. There is a hint of mist in the air, and though it’s mid-January, the morning temperature is warm, teasing us with a taste of spring. For weeks the thermometer in New York City has been ping-ponging from bitter freezing to short-sleeve mild, an unsettling if fitting backdrop, given that Chung’s debut novel, Sea Change, published by Vintage in March, has a foot in the genre of climate fiction. The unifying element of cli-fi, as it’s colloquially known, is the setting, a futuristic world deeply affected by climate crisis. Though the genre is marketed as speculative—part dystopian, part science fiction—Chung and I agree that these days cli-fi reads closer to realism.
Indeed, Sea Change is set in a recognizable world, seemingly only a decade or so ahead of our own. The most striking difference: Pollution from factories and refineries has created a mysterious zone in the Bering Sea called the Bering Vortex, where the water shines iridescent with toxins. The aquatic life that strangely thrives in this chemical soup has reverted to prehistoric dimensions, reminiscent of the magical marine beasts in Hayao Miyazaki’s 2008 animated film, Ponyo. The Vortex also has a sinister Bermuda Triangle quality to it, as the novel’s protagonist, Ro, lost her father there on a research trip fifteen years ago. He disappeared at sea, and Ro’s grief at his absence lingers. Like her father, Ro is an aquarist. Her main responsibility is caring for a two-decade-old mutant octopus named Dolores, with tentacles more than twenty feet long and eyes the size of classroom globes. This leviathan was pulled from the Vortex but now lives alone in an aquarium tank in a run-down shopping mall in New Jersey.
As Chung and I enter the park, walking under tree limbs laden with water droplets, Chung points to Karen Russell’s short story “The Gondoliers,” from Russell’s collection (Knopf, 2019), as one of the inspirations for her novel’s setting. In “The Gondoliers,” a youngwith strange flora and fauna. “I loved the idea of a beautiful, otherworldly seascape existing in the wake of the tragedy of pollution and the wreckage that we’ve made of our environment,” Chung says, adding that she hopes offers a clear look at the dangers of pollution in a way that doesn’t leave the reader despairing.
