We're Coming to the End of Earth Month. But Not the End of the Earth...Yet.
- Jann Alexander
- Apr 27
- 2 min read
Even the dystopian novels I'm reading these days aren't predicting that. Instead, they're showing us our history, and a way forward.
All the Water in the World, a mind-bending novel by Eiren Caffall I read in no time flat, paints a drowning world for her readers, populated with human characters who are finding a new way to begin by harkening to ideas and methods from the distant past. As Kirkus Reviews said, in a starred review, the novel is "A celebration of human perseverance at the hands of nature’s awe-inspiring power...Gripping, beautifully descriptive, and likely to stay with you." And it has.
In Switching Tracks - Out of the Trash, author Lena Gibson gives readers "a heroine whose heart can save a country's soul" in a post-apocalyptic world where corporate greed controls life's necessities, and an ancient society's trash is the only salvation for this future society of scavengers. It's the first title in a series, and one that Literary Titan called, "a poignant reminder of the human capacity to seek change in the face of overwhelming odds." I'm in the thick of this one now, and can't wait to get back to it.
Novels like these which rely on factual history to inspire the characters' future solutions to near-insurmountable challenges in an imagined dystopian world straddle the line between science fiction and historical fiction, becoming both educational and entertaining. As a longtime fan of historical novels, I'm enjoying the connection between past and future — when dystopian books offer up both.
But in looking to our past, historical fiction can depict some apocalypitc events we've overlooked or forgotten. During Earth Month, I used research I'd gathered for my historical novel, Unspoken, to highlight an ecological disaster that occurred 90 years ago in the US Plains states.
What makes Earth Month so significant?
How could that cause that greatest mass migration from the Plains states ever known in US history? And how could those who stay survive, and even thrive? I wanted to know more about those who held on during those hard times, and my findings became the novel Unspoken.
The themes in Unspoken echo our struggles.
The themes in Unspoken echo today's struggles. Upheaval, betrayal, estrangement, families lost and found, homelessness, and poverty are the themes we wake up to in today's headlines. In the 1930s, the Texas Dust Bowl was no different. And it was even tougher, because the era of dust storms that overwhelmed the Plains states occured during the Great Depresssion — a time of extreme unemployment across the country.
“There is no present or future — only the past, happening over and over again — now.” —EUGENE O'NEILL
The best way forward, I have long believed, is to read and understand our past ... because if history doesn't completely repeat itself, it comes pretty close. Whether you learn from our past mistakes by reading science fiction set in the future, or historical fiction based in the past, you'll realize the pleasurable time you spent lost in a book led you to universal truths.
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