Today I have the immense pleasure of inviting debut author Lauren Yero onto Bookish Brews. Lauren is absolutely brilliant and her novel tackles so many thought provoking topics, I really wanted to talk to her about the interconnectedness of it all. So today we’re talking about anticapitalist resistance, climate change, magical realism, and speculative fiction. Climate fiction has this beautiful way of speculating on not only the impact of climate change but also the creative ways in which we can combat it. It helps us open our minds to the unknown in a way that can help equip us for the fight ahead.
Bookish Brews Snapshot
Under This Forgetful Sky by Lauren Yero
Desperate to find a cure for his father’s fatal virus, Rumi escapes the safety of his walled city to find a cure and runs into a rebel outside the walls, Paz. With the powerful forces of the city looming over their heads, they must learn to trust each other if they want to imagine a new world.
🌊 Climate Fiction ✒️ Debut Author 🔮 Magical Realism 🤔 Thought Provoking
Interview with Lauren Yero
Amanda: Thank you so much for joining us on Bookish Brews. I’m so excited to talk to you today about speculative fiction’s unique potential to draw connections between the slow violence of climate change and imperialism. But first, can you introduce yourself and your book to us?
Lauren Yero: Hi Amanda! I’m so excited to chat about these ideas—thank you so much for having me!
A little about me: I grew up in Florida, surrounded by oak trees, swamps, and abandoned orange groves. I spent most of my time outside just wandering around, playing with frogs, and making up stories. After moving away from Florida for college, I lived all over—in the Pacific Northwest, in Nevada, and in western North Carolina. One side of my family is Cuban, so I spent much of my twenties living abroad in Spanish-speaking countries, trying to reconnect with that part of myself. I spent some time working as a travel writer in Chile, and that’s what sparked the idea that eventually grew into my debut novel, Under This Forgetful Sky.
Under This Forgetful Sky is a lot of things—it’s coming-of-age cli-fi flecked with magical realism, a story of adventure and star-crossed love, a quest narrative and a pandemic novel, a call to resistance, and a takedown of late capitalism. The story follows two teens from vastly different backgrounds on a journey across near-future Chile. On paper, they’re enemies—but, of course, it turns out to be much more complicated than that!
Amanda: I love how you describe your novel; it’s full of so many intersecting themes. Tell us a little about how these themes of climate fiction, magical realism, anticapitalist resistance, and the takedown of late capitalism intersect in your novel.
Lauren: There’s a quote by Frederic Jameson that stuck with me from the moment I read it—“it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” This idea that capitalism has so deeply penetrated our existence that we can’t imagine anything outside it—in fact, that we can’t even imagine a world without it—I find deeply disturbing. In many ways, Under This Forgetful Sky is my way of reckoning with the premise of the quote. Is it possible to imagine a different world?
Under This Forgetful Sky is set in a near-future where the spread of late capitalism has ushered in a (predictably) dark and dystopian global society. When I say ‘late capitalism,’ I mean the post-war rise of multinational corporations whose power and influence are greater than any single nation and who are therefore above responsibility to any one government.
In the world of the novel, a global network of walled-in cities has formed to protect a select few from the environmental devastation that plagues the rest of the world (which is where the cli-fi piece comes in). The novel is set in a time after power has been consolidated in these fortified cities. Resentment has been building outside the walls for generations. Factions of resistance fighters have begun to fight back. It’s because of this resistance that the two main characters of the novel, Rumi and Paz, first meet. And let’s just say that these two characters have very different opinions about the resistance movement!
The role that magical realism plays in the story is a bit harder to talk about without giving too much away, but I can say that the novel’s magical elements in many ways represent the power of story itself and the power of imagination to envision a different world. Because if we can’t imagine a world outside the bounds of capitalism, maybe we need new ways of imagining!
Amanda: That last part excites me the most! I firmly believe that stories help us open our minds to new ways of exploring the world. What first drew you to fiction as a means of understanding not only our world but also our future?
Lauren: Yes, me too! Stories can be so immensely powerful—for better or worse, of course. I grew up in a really conservative environment, and books and movies were the only places where I encountered stories that didn’t fit into a conservative Judeo-Christian framework. Stories truly were my window to look out beyond that world, and I clung to them like the lifeline they were.
College was the first time I really committed myself to learning more about climate change. And the way I dove into learning about it—everything, all at once—was pretty overwhelming. I threw myself into reading whatever I could find on the subject with a sort of existential fervor, which I know is an experience a lot of us have when we first come to terms with the reality of the climate crisis.
It was very much like Timothy Morton describes in The Ecological Thought: once you see the ecological crisis for what it is—the interconnectedness of it all—you can’t unsee it. You see it everywhere. Which is what led me to pursue a master’s degree in eco-criticism with a focus on post-colonial literatures.
Amanda: And what specifically drew you to speculative fiction?
Lauren: My literary first love has always been speculative fiction. So it was pretty inevitable that I returned to the genre when I started writing Under This Forgetful Sky. What draws me to speculative fiction, though, actually has very little to do with predicting the future.
I agree with Ursula Le Guin when she says, in her intro to The Left Hand of Darkness, that the purpose of speculative fiction “is not to predict the future… but to describe reality, the present world.” I think speculative fiction is most powerful not when it tries to predict what will happen in the future but when it uses a future (or other imagined) setting to give readers new ways of seeing our present world, when it makes visible the previously unseen connections within our own lives.
The really cool thing about speculative fiction is that big ideas like these are able to unfold not as some kind of didactic argument but as the interaction between the story, the re-imagined world, and the characters who live in that world. This is one of my hopes with Under This Forgetful Sky—that by bringing the realms of speculative fiction and environmental/social justice together, readers get the chance to make new and dynamic connections between imperialism (past, present, and future) and climate change.
There aren’t any answers or specific calls-to-action at the end of the novel, just a set of questions and connections to puzzle over (the novel literally ends with a question!). And because it’s YA, I hope it gives younger readers a chance to explore what they think about these questions, especially readers who find themselves in circumstances similar to mine in high school and who see stories as their window to the wider world.
Amanda: How were you able to use fiction as a tool to explore the intersection of anticapitalist resistance, climate change, and imperialism in a way you might not have been able to otherwise?
Lauren: When we talk about the unique power of fiction to create worlds, we often talk about how narrative allows us to imagine ourselves fully immersed within the world of the story, recreating its spatial, temporal, and logical modes within our own minds—in other words, “getting lost” in a story.
The difficulty with representing climate change in fiction, though, is its contradictory relationship to time and space. Climate change is happening both everywhere and nowhere; it’s happening now, in the past, and into the future. It’s what Timothy Morton calls a “hyperobject”—something that’s so vastly distributed and interconnected across time and space that it’s impossible to fully comprehend, like atmospheric carbon, ocean plastics, or the COVID-19 virus. This unfathomable quality makes climate change fundamentally difficult to write about.
When I started writing Under This Forgetful Sky, I knew it would take place in a world dramatically altered by climate change. I also knew that it would contend with the related concept of slow violence. “Slow violence” is a term coined by literary theorist Rob Nixon to describe the phenomenon of violence that occurs slowly over time and across vast distances—like the ongoing effects of the Bhopal chemical disaster in India or of the levees breaking in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The slow violence of imperialism, late-stage capitalism, and climate change all share this same relationship to space and time: their effects are diffuse, delayed, and often elusive.
To me, speculative fiction is the perfect tool for exploring temporally and spatially interconnected phenomena like these. While speculative fiction is, by definition, not “realistic,” I think it’s in some ways better able to convey the feeling of being alive at this moment in time than realistic fiction is. Realistic fiction simply can’t always capture how it feels to be alive in a certain place and time, in a certain body, in a certain set of circumstances, etc.
Climate change often feels more like a fantastical monster than a natural phenomenon—it’s powerful, destructive, unpredictable, ever-present. Its menace, everywhere and nowhere, elicits dread, uncertainty, despair. Speculative fiction can tease out the absurdities, the connections, and the seemingly unimaginable implications of climate change because it too has a unique relationship with time, space, and logic. When we read speculative fiction, we experience a kind of double vision. We see our present reality through the lens of an imagined possible world.
Amanda: So often people think that speculative fiction is pure imagination with no grounding in the world we live in, but I don’t think that can be farther from the truth. What are some ways that readers can begin to identify these parallels between speculative fiction and our real world?
Lauren: I totally agree! Speculative fiction is a huge, catch-all term—and some speculative novels are certainly more escapist than others. But there are so many writers creating speculative worlds expressly as a way to better describe the real world. To paraphrase from that same Le Guin intro: all novelists are liars, and all fiction is metaphor.
Speculative fiction just happens to be a bit more forthcoming about its lying nature. Zombies are never just zombies. Cyborgs are never just cyborgs. When the real world becomes so familiar to us that we can’t actually see it anymore, we need the defamiliarization—the “lies”—of speculative fiction to see it with fresh eyes.
One strategy that I use when trying to make connections between a work of speculative fiction and the real world is to explicitly focus on certain questions while I read. How does it feel to exist within the world of this novel, and how does that compare with my own specific way of existing in the real world? Another thing I like to focus on asking is: Who is the novel asking me to empathize with? And is it hard or easy for me to extend such empathy? The inverse of this question is often also interesting: Who are the “monsters”? Who (or what) am I being asked to fear—and why?
These are, of course, questions you can also ask about realistic fiction. But with speculative fiction, I think that the answers often end up being more surprising.
Amanda: What are some things about the interconnectedness of imperialism, late-stage capitalism, and climate change that people can take away from Under This Forgetful Sky? How can readers use this knowledge to push for a better world?
Lauren: There’s a parable in Under This Forgetful Sky about a philosopher. In it, the philosopher is sitting at home, reading and thinking about life’s big questions, when, outside his window, he hears a voice. The voice is screaming out in terrible pain. So the philosopher stands up and walks to the window to listen more closely. As he listens, he considers the nature of suffering, of violence, of injustice. Then he takes a sip of tea, checks the locks on his doors, and returns to his books, thankful that he’s inside and safe.
Some of us have been insulated from the worst effects of climate change. We have the luxury of thinking about it in the abstract or not thinking about it much at all. We can justify this by reasoning that we didn’t create the systems that lead to climate injustice. Even though we may benefit from their effects, we didn’t build the structures of violence and oppression forged by imperialism and late-stage capitalism. So where can we even begin? I know this is a question I’ve wrestled with for years. I still do.
In writing Under This Forgetful Sky, I was essentially asking myself: What would it look like to make a different decision than the philosopher in the story? What would it mean to instead open the door and go outside? To let go of the fear, the feelings of guilt and helplessness—all these barriers that we put up to further insulate us from the problem—and instead to listen to another’s experience and offer whatever help we can. There’s no one way to push for a better world, but I think it often starts by stepping outside of ourselves and into the experience of another. And what better way to begin this process than through fiction?
