Alissa Hattman’s ‘Sift’ Is a Post-Apocalyptic Prophecy

In his 2016 book The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh argues that we need a new literature to address and capture the realities of  climate change. But the novel, to Gosh’s mind, is ill-equipped—or, rather, unwilling—to engage with the current crisis. As environmental disasters from global warming become more extreme and “improbable,” he writes, “to introduce such happenings into a novel is in fact to court eviction from the mansion in which serious fiction has long been in residence.” However, by narrowing his interest to literary fiction, Gosh ignores much of the canon of speculative fiction that has long incorporated climate-change narratives, from as early as J.G. Ballard’s 1962 novel The Drowned World.