Humour, Grief, and Species Aloneness in Times of Mass Extinction. An Exchange Between Ida Olsen and Lydia Millet, Author of How the Dead Dream
“[T]o write fiction about dire, massive, looming manmade threats to life on earth isn’t as straightforward as writing about business-as-usual politics or doing satire.[…] There’s a thin, wobbly tightrope you have to walk. Suspended between the neutral, cold descriptiveness some writers preach as necessary to aesthetic rigor and the squishy, on-the-nose earnestness that makes activist fiction mediocre or flat-out bad. You have to find a way to situate your perspective in the habitable zone between austerity and mawkishness”.