Fantasy, sci-fi, and speculative fiction in general are often considered niche genres that are of limited interest to a wider readership. The benefit of this perception is that there is little pressure for speculative authors to conform their writing to the expectations of a general reader and rather values complex world building with elaborate systems at play. However, in recent years with the public’s rising awareness of climate disasters there have been several ‘literary’ fiction books that utilize speculative themes in the science fiction and dystopian genres. As a person who enjoys (and writes about) so-called genre fiction I have found these books to be underwhelming and at times frustrating as they try to take up the themes of these genres without putting in the work on world building and lore that makes speculative fiction enjoyable. This becomes a particularly interesting arctic choice when the narrative is otherwise strong, such as in Michael Christie’s Greenwood which was published in 2020 and tracks complex relationships between generations of a single family and the forests that they care for.

When authors set their story in a variation of the world we live in, whether that is past or present, they are able to lean on the reader’s familiarity with how this world works. This doesn’t mean that creating a setting for literary fiction isn’t important, it can still shape the way that your audience responds to the story, but readers are less likely to be looking for world building as a deciding factor of whether or not they like the novel. In fantasy the world building is central and the ability to create unique environments, worlds, and creatures to inhabit them can be enough to bring in a wide readership even if the story is not as strong. In Greenwood, the dystopian, almost science fiction world, is only a small part of the book mostly limited to the open and close of the novel. Because it takes a back seat to the historical setting of the novel there simply isn’t the space, or perceived need, for Christie to fully develop his last remaining forest in a world destroyed by blight. However, as a reader of science fiction, I wonder about that world and become quickly frustrated by the way that the functioning of this future world is hand waved away. Christie’s dystopian future is just detailed enough to support the climax of the story but lacks the kind of deep lore that regular readers of these genres will expect. 

I do think that Michael Christie was able to achieve the effect he wanted with the use of the dystopian bookends of the novel. Greenwood was an exploration of a multi-generational family who lived alongside forests and trees in a reciprocal relationship where the environmental conditions shaped the successes or struggles of each generation. Across train hopping laborers, gay lumberjacks, carpenters, and caretakers, the family was held up by their relationship with the trees. Christie captures this well, recognizing that the way his protagonists, mostly white settler Americans, thought about the environment and resource extraction would have shifted over the generations, while also delving deeply into the ways that human and plant rely on each other. In this sense the dystopian leap forward at the end of the book makes sense, a kind of foreshadowing of what our relationship with the forest will be like should current behaviors not radically change. For a general readership who is used to the conventions of literary fiction I think this point will be elegantly made but for people that regularly read speculative writing the lack of detail actually creates a greater sense of distance because of the emphasis that was placed on the historical generation.

This motif of sweeping historical fiction with a dystopian future has become more common, appearing in books that have gained critical acclaim with a wide audience. I first noticed it with Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (which I think is now being turned into a TV show) but Antony Doer’s most recent book Cloud Cuckoo Land also picked it up alongside some of my least favourite speculative tropes. I would suggest that a large part of this growing trend is the awareness that the real world is genuinely in crisis, making the concept of a dystopian future seem more tangible for many readers. However, the weaker world building of these stories also removes some of the function that thinking about the far future can have in speculative writing. The futures of Greenwood and its siblings is not developed enough to explore real solutions or to think about what needed to happen differently in our day to avoid the future they depict. Perhaps this loss is part of why I find reading these types of stories frustrating at times.

Concluding literary or historical fiction with dramatic dystopian futures can be an effective culmination of these types of stories and ultimately I think Michael Christie’s Greenwood is a better text because of his experimentation with genre. But in responding to these novels as someone who also enjoys fantasy, sci-fi, and other speculative genres that rely heavily on world building I still think that something is lost by appending it onto more mainstream books. A book like Greenwood is always going to feel a little incomplete to me because of the weaker world building but I also think that the crossing of genres is helping to build more respect for previously niche forms of writing as well as providing us collective tools for thinking about how we are world building in our real lives and the future that our choices create. 

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