Tim Jones
You Are My Sunshine and other stories by Octavia Cade (Stelliform Press, 2023), 212pp, US$19.99
You Are My Sunshine and other stories includes several outstanding stories and many very good ones, all themed around climate and ecological collapse, and the tentative possibilities that exist to recover from, or at least arrest, that collapse. Biology and ecology are prominent both as subject matter and metaphor. This collection confirms Octavia Cade as a very fine short story writer.
Before talking about the collection as a sequence of stories, it’s worth pointing out that many of these stories have appeared in speculative fiction magazines, including such top-of-the-line international markets as Asimov’s, Strange Horizons and Clarkesworld, and others have been published in a range of venues, including Stuff’s Forever Project. Octavia Cade has made a major international name for herself in recent years, and the stories in this collection clearly show why. The writing is strong, incisive, at times witty, and well-informed by science, especially biological science.
The first half of the collection focuses on where we’ve got to, how we got there, and whose responsibility it is as the climate and ecological emergencies bite us all, even those who thought until very recently that their wealth and privilege would insulate them. The second half moves towards transformation of individuals and society. In parallel with this, the stories move from individual grief to collective action and from isolation to connection. That gives the collection a clear structure and strong thematic movement, but I also found that it made the first half tough going at times.
That’s both because of the devastating directness of the early stories at their best—the first story, ‘We Feed the Bears of Fire and Ice’, is a particularly striking example—and because the longest piece in the book, the title novelette ‘You Are My Sunshine’, which is the third of these eighteen stories and takes up around forty pages, was the story that worked least well for me. (I should mention that in this instance, as a reviewer, I read the stories in order. As a regular reader, I hop and skip back and forth in short story collections, looking for the stories that appeal to me most—and there are many such stories here.)
So I will start at the start, with those bears. ‘We Feed the Bears of Fire and Ice’, set in Australia (and written before the horrific 2019–20 bushfires), shows us Australian species like koalas (who are not actually ‘bears’, as the story acknowledges) and crocodiles taking revenge on humanity, while those humans who have been lied to—and who have sometimes lied to themselves—take their revenge on the most prominent liars:
We set fire to them first, the worst of the liars. When the city started burning down, when it was too hot to live above ground and those monstrous footprints started burning city blocks we dragged out the politicians who’d signed and bribed and looked away, strung them from lamp-posts with their cuts gut out and hanging down …
Scott Morrison, the former Australian Prime Minister who famously responded to criticism of his utter failures on climate and bushfires by saying, ‘I don’t hold a hose, mate’, should be made to read this one. Repeatedly.
The title novelette, ‘You Are My Sunshine’, is an intriguing concept. If forced to put in a genre, I’d say it was ecological body horror comedy—but for me, the material of the story wasn’t rich enough to justify its length, even though the idea of a scientist sacrificing themselves for the species they love is a strong one (and one that reoccurs throughout the collection). It’s the most experimental story in the book, combining what at first blush appears to be a serial killer narrative with species extinction, psychological drama and some dry family-and-friends comedy. Thematically, it fits in the first half of the collection, but in terms of the experience of reading the book, I found it came too early and diminished my appreciation of the first half of the collection.
Many of the early stories remind me of J.G. Ballard’s early work, with their emphasis on psychological adaptation to catastrophe and their isolated, almost solipsistic characters mired in stasis—though in this collection, overwhelming grief for the death of the planet’s ecosystems at human hands is what has driven these characters into isolation.
The turn towards a more positive, dynamic, outward-looking focus begins with ‘Inside the Body of Relatives’ (among other things, a timely tribute to our state housing system) and continues through ‘Resilience’, the story I enjoyed most in this collection.
‘Resilience’ was published in Stuff’s Forever Project, a quarterly online and print magazine launched in March 2020, just as the first COVID lockdown began. A short story was commissioned for each issue—and my own short story ‘The Double-Cab Club’ appeared in the inaugural March 2020 issue. The Forever Project’s brief was to be hopeful and constructive about the possibility of climate solutions, rather than apocalyptically depressing—and ‘Resilience’ is a story that fits with that theme, as two beautifully drawn children, conniving yet endearing, take part in the rewilding of the world. This quote gives a flavour:
Stupidity, she thought, was the best camouflage in the world. The only thing better was youth. Looking young and dumb got her through every predator-proof fence she liked. If she was ever questioned she just fished a clipboard out of her backpack and pretended to be doing an assignment for school. It never failed.
One of the great strengths of these stories, especially the shorter ones, is how well they function as extended metaphor. ‘The Body Politic’ was first published in an anthology called Recognizing Fascism (2020), and it is a brilliant biological metaphor for how the self-defeating logic of fascism leads to death and destruction.
I first encountered ‘The Stone Wētā’ as a novella, published by Paper Road Press in Aotearoa in 2020—but that novella was expanded from the short story of the same name first published in Clarkesworld magazine in 2017, which is the version included in this collection. In it, female scientists who go by the codenames of the species they study risk much to preserve and share real, factual information about the world in the face of official attempts to suppress it. Here, the political and the ecological stories intertwine and reinforce each other. Just as the economy is a subsidiary of the environment, so politics depends on ecology, no matter how much politicians seek to suppress that knowledge.
As an author, Octavia Cade is interested in how people can live together, with each other, with the flora of our gut and the fauna of our skin, with the creatures and the ecosystems on which we depend but which we are so eager to destroy—or at least, are often so heedless of destroying. The final story in the collection, ‘The History of a Coral Future’, applies the metaphor of a coral reef, which crops up throughout this collection, to the design of cities:
We took away cars and replaced them with fruit trees, we built wetlands around public libraries, because both were systems of resilience and stories made easy friends with swamps. We uncovered rivers. We built for birds as well as business … We built as if we were building coral, and we built for diversity, and for strength.
It could be argued that ‘The History of a Coral Future’ is more of a counterfactual essay, recounting a hoped-for history that has not yet occurred, than an actual story—but nevertheless, it shows how far the collection has moved on from ‘We Feed the Bears of Fire and Ice’, from anger, fear, guilt and death to compassion and hope.
The most pessimistic stories in this book have a monolithic force, based on the author’s deep knowledge of ecology and extinction, that renders them all too realistic, whereas at times I felt the most optimistic stories skated too lightly over the enormous difficulties, the entrenched vested interests, that stand in the way of realising their vision. However the unremitting darkness of the first few stories felt suffocating at times; it felt good when chinks of light began to shine through as the collection moved towards its conclusion.
You Are My Sunshine and other stories is full of confident and well-written short fiction with a distinctive voice and a clear focus. You might find, as I did, that the first half of the book does not make for comfortable reading. But I liked the way the collection does not leave us in a place of despair, it offers the possibility of transformation—perilous transformation, to be sure, but less perilous than attempting to pretend that we can continue as we are.
TIM JONES is a Wellington writer and climate activist. His latest book is climate fiction novel Emergency Weather (The Cuba Press, 2023).
Leave a Reply