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Death by Landscape
From the author of Oval, a collection of “fan nonfiction” that proposes new possibilities and genealogies for weird fiction in the age of extinction.
This collection is about love, death, plants, and weird fiction. It takes its title from a Margaret Atwood story in which an adolescent girl seems to turn into a tree. It examines works by Doris Lessing, Jenny Hval, Anne Carson, Octavia Butler, Michelle Tea, Helen Phillips, Mark Fisher, Donna Haraway, and Jeff and Ann VanderMeer; it explores the erotics of compost, vampire-themed live-action roleplaying, intoxicated birds, medieval nuns, invasive spores, and solarpunk. The book asks: what kind of stories are being written that help us rethink our human-centric perspective of Earth? What kinds of narratives will make sense of the age of extinction? Death by Landscape creates a syllabus for feminist sci-fi and speculative fiction for our time.
This collection is about love, death, plants, and weird fiction. It takes its title from a Margaret Atwood story in which an adolescent girl seems to turn into a tree. It examines works by Doris Lessing, Jenny Hval, Anne Carson, Octavia Butler, Michelle Tea, Helen Phillips, Mark Fisher, Donna Haraway, and Jeff and Ann VanderMeer; it explores the erotics of compost, vampire-themed live-action roleplaying, intoxicated birds, medieval nuns, invasive spores, and solarpunk. The book asks: what kind of stories are being written that help us rethink our human-centric perspective of Earth? What kinds of narratives will make sense of the age of extinction? Death by Landscape creates a syllabus for feminist sci-fi and speculative fiction for our time.
308 pages, Paperback
First published July 19, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 77 reviews
September 28, 2022
I feel like this is the type of book one might appreciate if you wanted to feel like an intellectual about the state of the world without having to do very much work about what that actually means. Much of my issues with this book come from the fact that Wilk clearly knows how to use the language of progressivism, yet many of the ideas she puts forth (particularly in Plants) echo ecofascist talking points. She generalizes humanity's relationship with nature as purely negative and extractive over and over again. She follows this up by saying maybe it would be good for the Earth if humanity vanished. Now, this line of reasoning is unfortunately very common. If you don't spend much time reading intersectional environmental literature, it's easy to fall into the idea that all people, everywhere, are bad for nature. Wilk provided very little in the way to counteract this troubled reasoning, and essentially advocated we should all just accept our inevitable change/death. It irks me that someone who supposedly spent so much time reading environmental works could not see how harmful this particular attitude is to hold, especially for marginalized groups.
That glaring issue aside, I think her essays shined the most when they focused on her personal experiences. The epilogue was perhaps the most resonant part of this book for me, but I can't say I can recommend the rest of it very strongly. You need to spend a lot of time picking apart the arguments in this book, or else you run the risk of tacitly agreeing with some pretty uninformed/borderline dangerous viewpoints, which I fear many who read this book have done. Wilk is clearly a talented author in terms of her writing skills, so this makes it really easy to agree with a bad argument dressed up in lace.
One book I will recommend in place of this one and touches upon similar ideas is Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass. Kimmerer is able to provide the image of hope in the face of climate change that Wilk is unable to deliver, and also comes from both a personal and scientific background that better inform her views about the environment and how people form relationships with it.
That glaring issue aside, I think her essays shined the most when they focused on her personal experiences. The epilogue was perhaps the most resonant part of this book for me, but I can't say I can recommend the rest of it very strongly. You need to spend a lot of time picking apart the arguments in this book, or else you run the risk of tacitly agreeing with some pretty uninformed/borderline dangerous viewpoints, which I fear many who read this book have done. Wilk is clearly a talented author in terms of her writing skills, so this makes it really easy to agree with a bad argument dressed up in lace.
One book I will recommend in place of this one and touches upon similar ideas is Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass. Kimmerer is able to provide the image of hope in the face of climate change that Wilk is unable to deliver, and also comes from both a personal and scientific background that better inform her views about the environment and how people form relationships with it.
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July 29, 2022"As we live through the Anthropocene, our current epoch of human-made disaster, a new book, Elvia Wilk’s 'Death by Landscape,' argues compellingly that giving more space to the weird can help us reconsider our relationships to nature—and, even in the face of institutional inertia, exercise greater responsibility to each other." — Michael Friedrich
https://www.theatlantic.com/books/arc...
https://www.theatlantic.com/books/arc...
May 27, 2025
An intellectual examination of the intersection of climate, literature and the self. Beautifully crafted in a way that will compel you to contemplate things you may never have imagined (vampire larps, trauma obsession as a means of relating to Christ, women physically transforming into plants). As I read this, I wanted to immediately understand Wilk more deeply. Fortunately, as the essays progress, we get more of the author and the glimpse inside her intuitive mind expands into her person beyond the research. Prepare to leave this collection with a list of additional books to read and films to watch…my favorite type of homework.
October 27, 2025
*4.5. I must have ran in the same tumblr/internet circles as the author, because I related not only to her thoughts but also to the references she pulled from. Some quotes:
“The anus is threatening to patriarchal capitalism, though, precisely because it is sexy and reproductive—as long as anal sex is understood as sex and shit is understood as manure from which new life grows. That new life is not, at least in the first stage, human life. The worldview required to uncastrate the anus, to reach toward an ‘anal utopia,’ as Preciado puts it, would require one to consider nonhuman species as part of an ecosystem in which shit is essential food rather than toxic waste. ‘The kids-with-castrated-anuses built a community they called City, State, Nation.’ This community is limited to those whose anuses are closed, meaning those who see the goal of all life as capital production and biological reproduction.
Where would all that erotic energy go to in the anal utopia? If all orifices were understood to be potentially erotic—the nostrils, the pores of the skin—and all orifices were seen as (re)productive? If productivity was beside the point? If bodies did not have ‘outsides and insides, marking zones of privilege and abject zones’? If desire were not seen as ‘a reserve of truth’ but rather as ‘an artifact that is culturally constructed, modeled by social violence, incentives and rewards, but also by fear of exclusion’? If desire were no longer a marker of identity, by which one is made queer or femme or whatever else? If desire were instead seen as ‘an arbitrary slice of an uninterrupted and polyvocal flow’?
If interpenetration were understood as a constant fact rather than a means to a reproductive end? Erotic energy is made political by being made ecological.”
“In an essay about nonhuman sociality, anthropologist Anna Tsing says that plants do not have ‘faces, nor mouths to smile and speak; it is hard to confuse their communicative and representational practices with our own. Yet their world-making activities and their freedom to act are also clear—if we allow freedom and world-making to be more than intention and planning.’ Tsing points out how bizarre it is that we have long assumed plants are not social beings—and that when we try to imagine them as such, it is through anthropomorphism. Carnivorous murderers, or kindly creatures transmitting nature's wisdom. Either way, the extent to which the plant is social depends on the extent to which the plant can socialize on our terms, with us. Who speaks for plants? Who should get to speak for plants? Scientists? Filmmakers? Novelists?
Plant—and animal, and geological, and planetary—sentience is tied up with media technology partly because technology…has promised to give us access to nonhuman knowledge through translation. But machines themselves are also increasingly the subject of inquiries into nonhuman communication, especially because computers are increasingly able to speak like people in languages we can easily understand. Artificial intelligences can now write sentences indistinguishable from human literature, providing an opportunity for people to communicate with an alien consciousness in a deceptively straightforward way. With AI it's like we have created the fiddle-leaf fig we hoped could explain itself in our language. Yet the desire for a machine to speak like a person is just the same old desire that reifies the way people communicate, and insists that other beings learn to do it our way.”
“On one hand, naming the crisis allows people to apprehend it, grasp it, fight back against it. On the other hand, no word can fully encompass it, and any term is necessarily a reduction—the essence of ‘it’ or ‘change’ is not any singular instance but rather its constancy. For example, while one could call COVID-19 a biological crisis, one could just as accurately call it a health-care crisis, a values crisis, or an ecological crisis. Names matter: think of how Donna Haraway reframed the Anthropocene era as the ‘Capitalocene,’ redirecting blame from the human species as such to humanity's current economic system of relentless extraction and exploitation. In some ways, the Capitalocene is a more optimistic title for our era than the Anthropocene, because it implies that there is another way: although we might remain anthropos, we can still construct our world according to a different set of priorities and principles than the ones capitalism allows.
Year Zero is a useful concept for a story to hinge on because it reflects modernity's entrenched desire for moments of rupture that change everything at once. Disasters do shape history and intervene in the narratives many cling to—but in truth they only catalyze and make visible malignant processes that have been ongoing for a long time. The biggest disasters are the ones that are never identified as such—what Rob Nixon calls ‘slow violence’, those occurrences, like gradual environmental devastation, that disproportionately affect those without a megaphone, and which are not deemed newsworthy because they are not sensational single events. (One could also take up Keller Easterling's use of the term disposition to describe the latent violent attitudes of infrastructure design—from electrical grids to legislation—that are only made manifest when the system spectacularly fails.) The pandemic might also be reframed as a form of slow violence, resulting not only from sudden, invasive, ‘foreign,’ nonhuman threats, but also from ongoing, pervasive power imbalances inside and outside the arbitrary borders we draw around places, people, and concepts.”
“Precisely because the pandemic has not been the great leveler, because one person’s misery is another’s jackpot, it may force us to think of history in a different way, less in terms of major events instigated by a few and more in terms of processes that involve and implicate the many.”
“I would wager that most dystopian writers don’t really think utopia is for suckers—it’s more that pinning one’s politics entirely on hope while facing extinction feels somewhat delusional.”
“The way James uses the term, ‘resilience isn't just 'recovery’ or ‘bouncing back’ in genera, but a sociohistorically specific technique and ideology’ that makes individuals responsible for personally overcoming their suffering in a way that is ‘profitable’ for capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. A resilient woman survives breast cancer and then becomes a pink-ribbon salesperson; she survives rape and then learns karate; she survives abandonment and pays for a makeover to attract a new mate. Adversity becomes opportunity. All options ‘turn damage and deficit into surplus value,’ yet none of them create real resistance against the structures that produced the damage in the first place. ‘Resilience is the contemporary update of mourning; instead of conquering damage we recycle it.’”
“To explain what he means by weird, Fisher counterposes the black hole with the figure of the vampire. As opposed to a black hole, which is unfamiliar but exists, a vampire is a nonexistent but entirely familiar figure based on a set of commonly understood fictions. A vampire might be supernatural, he explains, but it isn't weird. Black holes are weird because they are natural. To quote Fisher: ‘If the entity or object is here, then the categories which we have up until now used to make sense of the world cannot be valid. The weird thing is not wrong, after all: it is our conceptions that must be inadequate.’
In this sense, weirdness provides a sort of methodology for reading stories that lead toward the black hole. This methodology is to accept at face value things that literally exist but nonetheless resist linguistic description or cognitive explanation: things or events that dismantle the tools of signification and representation that fiction supposedly depends upon. This is fiction in tension with itself, which uses the human technologies of language, story, and description to forge an aesthetic encounter that transcends the explicability those tools are supposed to provide. It is fiction that triangulates desire by creating absences at the center of the plot that cannot be resolved.”
“Unlike van der Kolk's proposed remedies, medieval devotional practices focused on suffering do not aim to resolve personal trauma. They aim to invoke Christ's suffering, and dwell on it. In Hollywood's words, ‘They attempt to inculcate traumatic or bodily memory—or something very like it—by rendering involuntary, vivid, and inescapable the central catastrophic event of Christian history so that the individual believer might relive and share in that trauma.’ You're supposed to get so close to Christ's experience (through media like books and paintings) that you never let his misery be resolved. For his somatic experience is the foundation of his transcendence, is the proof of God's love. It's a whole body system built on someone else's trauma. This allowed people to create a connection between their regular human suffering and saintly suffering--Christ and the many saints, like Lucia, who were martyred in his name. Your pain is not special, which means it is not yours alone to bear.”
“Regardless of whether lack of empathy, or attitude toward empathy, is really the problem, it is impossible to stay pained on behalf of another's suffering every moment of the day. Seeing more misery, many argue, might have the opposite intended effect—it could max out the empathic faculties all those pictures and VR projects intend to stimulate. Jaron Lanier, technologist and author of the comprehensive 2017 VR history Dawn of the New Everything, refers to this hard limit on compassion as the empathy circle. ‘If you make your circle of empathy too wide,’ he writes, "’you become incompetent and don't help anyone.’ He cautions against attempts to use advanced technology to expand that circle beyond what any single person can bear.
Perhaps more to the point, structures that uphold violence and inequality will not be dismantled through higher-resolution or more immersive empathy machines. White supremacists, to take the most obvious example, desire to see the suffering of non-white bodies, and supremacy will not be overturned through media saturation. On the contrary, Lanier writes, ‘The more intense a communication technology is, the more intensely it can be used to lie.’ Seeing more does not mean believing more. As architect and activist Eyal Weizman has said, ‘truth has become a function of bandwidth and resolution’; in the current paradigm, the more we can see, the more we will demand to see to believe. Suspicion—an unshakable belief that one is being lied to or manipulated—will always be built into a political system entirely reliant on high-definition verisimilitude for truth claims.
Newer media will always be required to prove what's real.”
“The entire philanthropic-industrial complex is premised on this core hope and belief that people will do good if only they understand what is really going on, if only they are presented with the high-enough-resolution suffering of an identifiable victim. The allure of a technology that could provide that kind of experience—without the danger or cost of sending civilians into a war zone—is hard to resist.”
“In other words, a one-way understanding of empathy reproduces power relations rather than levels them. It focuses only on the extent that I can relate to you. Psychology has a language for this; it is known as the self-other overlap, whereby the wish to identify with another person becomes a projection, with the empathizer's own beliefs and desires overriding those of the target. Self-other overlap cannot itself constitute empathy if it does not also lead one to consider the other as a separate person with agency—who has the capacity to empathize in reverse.”
“In a world reliant on philanthropy, trauma is an asset. A weak asset to be sure, but often the only asset granted to the dispossessed in late capitalism. Humanitarianism instrumentalizes and leverages this asset, finding ways to exchange it for other forms of capital. Anthropologist Miriam Ticktin, who writes on humanitarian organizations, says that ‘an understanding of suffering as the basis of a universal humanity can result in the obligation to use suffering to barter for membership in the category [of] humanity.’ The sufferer is granted human status by demonstrating the ability to suffer, which is then validated by the witness's ability to understand the suffering as real. The firsthand suffering testifies to the humanity of the sufferer; the secondhand experience testifies to the humanity of the viewer.”
“The intimacy required for love is often thought of as mutual recognition: I see you for who you are and you see me back. But recognition is also inevitably a naming, a fixing, a pinning down. In order to recognize, you have to categorize. The writer Jan Verwoert describes the slippage between love-as-recognition and love-as-control in an essay called ‘Masters and Servants or Lovers: On Love as a Way to Not Recognize the Other.’ Verwoert explains that intimacy cuts both ways:
‘To love the other, we believe, is the most intimate way to recognize the other, to get to know and understand who he or she really is ... But this is what power is about as well when it manifests itself in structures of domination. Modern regimes of power are built on the intimate knowledge of who the people are they dominate. Surveillance, espionage and market research are techniques of recognition that help to identify, understand and control the other—be that the citizen, the enemy or the consumer... Consequently, [a] radical love would be a love that goes beyond recognition, that is a love in which the lovers would renounce their desire to fully grasp the identity of the other and no longer insist on understanding who the other is.’”
“The future is a blank space; it always has been; once you understand this, your ordering principle falls apart.”
“The anus is threatening to patriarchal capitalism, though, precisely because it is sexy and reproductive—as long as anal sex is understood as sex and shit is understood as manure from which new life grows. That new life is not, at least in the first stage, human life. The worldview required to uncastrate the anus, to reach toward an ‘anal utopia,’ as Preciado puts it, would require one to consider nonhuman species as part of an ecosystem in which shit is essential food rather than toxic waste. ‘The kids-with-castrated-anuses built a community they called City, State, Nation.’ This community is limited to those whose anuses are closed, meaning those who see the goal of all life as capital production and biological reproduction.
Where would all that erotic energy go to in the anal utopia? If all orifices were understood to be potentially erotic—the nostrils, the pores of the skin—and all orifices were seen as (re)productive? If productivity was beside the point? If bodies did not have ‘outsides and insides, marking zones of privilege and abject zones’? If desire were not seen as ‘a reserve of truth’ but rather as ‘an artifact that is culturally constructed, modeled by social violence, incentives and rewards, but also by fear of exclusion’? If desire were no longer a marker of identity, by which one is made queer or femme or whatever else? If desire were instead seen as ‘an arbitrary slice of an uninterrupted and polyvocal flow’?
If interpenetration were understood as a constant fact rather than a means to a reproductive end? Erotic energy is made political by being made ecological.”
“In an essay about nonhuman sociality, anthropologist Anna Tsing says that plants do not have ‘faces, nor mouths to smile and speak; it is hard to confuse their communicative and representational practices with our own. Yet their world-making activities and their freedom to act are also clear—if we allow freedom and world-making to be more than intention and planning.’ Tsing points out how bizarre it is that we have long assumed plants are not social beings—and that when we try to imagine them as such, it is through anthropomorphism. Carnivorous murderers, or kindly creatures transmitting nature's wisdom. Either way, the extent to which the plant is social depends on the extent to which the plant can socialize on our terms, with us. Who speaks for plants? Who should get to speak for plants? Scientists? Filmmakers? Novelists?
Plant—and animal, and geological, and planetary—sentience is tied up with media technology partly because technology…has promised to give us access to nonhuman knowledge through translation. But machines themselves are also increasingly the subject of inquiries into nonhuman communication, especially because computers are increasingly able to speak like people in languages we can easily understand. Artificial intelligences can now write sentences indistinguishable from human literature, providing an opportunity for people to communicate with an alien consciousness in a deceptively straightforward way. With AI it's like we have created the fiddle-leaf fig we hoped could explain itself in our language. Yet the desire for a machine to speak like a person is just the same old desire that reifies the way people communicate, and insists that other beings learn to do it our way.”
“On one hand, naming the crisis allows people to apprehend it, grasp it, fight back against it. On the other hand, no word can fully encompass it, and any term is necessarily a reduction—the essence of ‘it’ or ‘change’ is not any singular instance but rather its constancy. For example, while one could call COVID-19 a biological crisis, one could just as accurately call it a health-care crisis, a values crisis, or an ecological crisis. Names matter: think of how Donna Haraway reframed the Anthropocene era as the ‘Capitalocene,’ redirecting blame from the human species as such to humanity's current economic system of relentless extraction and exploitation. In some ways, the Capitalocene is a more optimistic title for our era than the Anthropocene, because it implies that there is another way: although we might remain anthropos, we can still construct our world according to a different set of priorities and principles than the ones capitalism allows.
Year Zero is a useful concept for a story to hinge on because it reflects modernity's entrenched desire for moments of rupture that change everything at once. Disasters do shape history and intervene in the narratives many cling to—but in truth they only catalyze and make visible malignant processes that have been ongoing for a long time. The biggest disasters are the ones that are never identified as such—what Rob Nixon calls ‘slow violence’, those occurrences, like gradual environmental devastation, that disproportionately affect those without a megaphone, and which are not deemed newsworthy because they are not sensational single events. (One could also take up Keller Easterling's use of the term disposition to describe the latent violent attitudes of infrastructure design—from electrical grids to legislation—that are only made manifest when the system spectacularly fails.) The pandemic might also be reframed as a form of slow violence, resulting not only from sudden, invasive, ‘foreign,’ nonhuman threats, but also from ongoing, pervasive power imbalances inside and outside the arbitrary borders we draw around places, people, and concepts.”
“Precisely because the pandemic has not been the great leveler, because one person’s misery is another’s jackpot, it may force us to think of history in a different way, less in terms of major events instigated by a few and more in terms of processes that involve and implicate the many.”
“I would wager that most dystopian writers don’t really think utopia is for suckers—it’s more that pinning one’s politics entirely on hope while facing extinction feels somewhat delusional.”
“The way James uses the term, ‘resilience isn't just 'recovery’ or ‘bouncing back’ in genera, but a sociohistorically specific technique and ideology’ that makes individuals responsible for personally overcoming their suffering in a way that is ‘profitable’ for capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. A resilient woman survives breast cancer and then becomes a pink-ribbon salesperson; she survives rape and then learns karate; she survives abandonment and pays for a makeover to attract a new mate. Adversity becomes opportunity. All options ‘turn damage and deficit into surplus value,’ yet none of them create real resistance against the structures that produced the damage in the first place. ‘Resilience is the contemporary update of mourning; instead of conquering damage we recycle it.’”
“To explain what he means by weird, Fisher counterposes the black hole with the figure of the vampire. As opposed to a black hole, which is unfamiliar but exists, a vampire is a nonexistent but entirely familiar figure based on a set of commonly understood fictions. A vampire might be supernatural, he explains, but it isn't weird. Black holes are weird because they are natural. To quote Fisher: ‘If the entity or object is here, then the categories which we have up until now used to make sense of the world cannot be valid. The weird thing is not wrong, after all: it is our conceptions that must be inadequate.’
In this sense, weirdness provides a sort of methodology for reading stories that lead toward the black hole. This methodology is to accept at face value things that literally exist but nonetheless resist linguistic description or cognitive explanation: things or events that dismantle the tools of signification and representation that fiction supposedly depends upon. This is fiction in tension with itself, which uses the human technologies of language, story, and description to forge an aesthetic encounter that transcends the explicability those tools are supposed to provide. It is fiction that triangulates desire by creating absences at the center of the plot that cannot be resolved.”
“Unlike van der Kolk's proposed remedies, medieval devotional practices focused on suffering do not aim to resolve personal trauma. They aim to invoke Christ's suffering, and dwell on it. In Hollywood's words, ‘They attempt to inculcate traumatic or bodily memory—or something very like it—by rendering involuntary, vivid, and inescapable the central catastrophic event of Christian history so that the individual believer might relive and share in that trauma.’ You're supposed to get so close to Christ's experience (through media like books and paintings) that you never let his misery be resolved. For his somatic experience is the foundation of his transcendence, is the proof of God's love. It's a whole body system built on someone else's trauma. This allowed people to create a connection between their regular human suffering and saintly suffering--Christ and the many saints, like Lucia, who were martyred in his name. Your pain is not special, which means it is not yours alone to bear.”
“Regardless of whether lack of empathy, or attitude toward empathy, is really the problem, it is impossible to stay pained on behalf of another's suffering every moment of the day. Seeing more misery, many argue, might have the opposite intended effect—it could max out the empathic faculties all those pictures and VR projects intend to stimulate. Jaron Lanier, technologist and author of the comprehensive 2017 VR history Dawn of the New Everything, refers to this hard limit on compassion as the empathy circle. ‘If you make your circle of empathy too wide,’ he writes, "’you become incompetent and don't help anyone.’ He cautions against attempts to use advanced technology to expand that circle beyond what any single person can bear.
Perhaps more to the point, structures that uphold violence and inequality will not be dismantled through higher-resolution or more immersive empathy machines. White supremacists, to take the most obvious example, desire to see the suffering of non-white bodies, and supremacy will not be overturned through media saturation. On the contrary, Lanier writes, ‘The more intense a communication technology is, the more intensely it can be used to lie.’ Seeing more does not mean believing more. As architect and activist Eyal Weizman has said, ‘truth has become a function of bandwidth and resolution’; in the current paradigm, the more we can see, the more we will demand to see to believe. Suspicion—an unshakable belief that one is being lied to or manipulated—will always be built into a political system entirely reliant on high-definition verisimilitude for truth claims.
Newer media will always be required to prove what's real.”
“The entire philanthropic-industrial complex is premised on this core hope and belief that people will do good if only they understand what is really going on, if only they are presented with the high-enough-resolution suffering of an identifiable victim. The allure of a technology that could provide that kind of experience—without the danger or cost of sending civilians into a war zone—is hard to resist.”
“In other words, a one-way understanding of empathy reproduces power relations rather than levels them. It focuses only on the extent that I can relate to you. Psychology has a language for this; it is known as the self-other overlap, whereby the wish to identify with another person becomes a projection, with the empathizer's own beliefs and desires overriding those of the target. Self-other overlap cannot itself constitute empathy if it does not also lead one to consider the other as a separate person with agency—who has the capacity to empathize in reverse.”
“In a world reliant on philanthropy, trauma is an asset. A weak asset to be sure, but often the only asset granted to the dispossessed in late capitalism. Humanitarianism instrumentalizes and leverages this asset, finding ways to exchange it for other forms of capital. Anthropologist Miriam Ticktin, who writes on humanitarian organizations, says that ‘an understanding of suffering as the basis of a universal humanity can result in the obligation to use suffering to barter for membership in the category [of] humanity.’ The sufferer is granted human status by demonstrating the ability to suffer, which is then validated by the witness's ability to understand the suffering as real. The firsthand suffering testifies to the humanity of the sufferer; the secondhand experience testifies to the humanity of the viewer.”
“The intimacy required for love is often thought of as mutual recognition: I see you for who you are and you see me back. But recognition is also inevitably a naming, a fixing, a pinning down. In order to recognize, you have to categorize. The writer Jan Verwoert describes the slippage between love-as-recognition and love-as-control in an essay called ‘Masters and Servants or Lovers: On Love as a Way to Not Recognize the Other.’ Verwoert explains that intimacy cuts both ways:
‘To love the other, we believe, is the most intimate way to recognize the other, to get to know and understand who he or she really is ... But this is what power is about as well when it manifests itself in structures of domination. Modern regimes of power are built on the intimate knowledge of who the people are they dominate. Surveillance, espionage and market research are techniques of recognition that help to identify, understand and control the other—be that the citizen, the enemy or the consumer... Consequently, [a] radical love would be a love that goes beyond recognition, that is a love in which the lovers would renounce their desire to fully grasp the identity of the other and no longer insist on understanding who the other is.’”
“The future is a blank space; it always has been; once you understand this, your ordering principle falls apart.”
February 23, 2022
This collection of essays takes its title from a short story by Margaret Atwood (which can be found in her 1991 collection Wilderness Tips) which is, on a very basic level, about humanity's relationship with the natural world (which is hardly an unusual theme for Atwood, of course), but also self-identity, the nature of perception, the nature of loss, environmentalism, feminism...all of which themes inform Wilk's interconnected essays as she discusses various books, films, and writers.
If there's a single overlying concept to Death By Landscape, it's a defence of genre writing—the importance of non-mainstream perspective and the utility of alternative or speculative story-telling—as Wilk discusses writers and books from the Old/New Weird (H.P. Lovecraft, Jeff VanderMeer) to body-horror (Jenny Hval, Kathe Koja) to sci-fi/cli-fi (Jonathan Lethem, Michelle Tea) to cyberpunk/solarpunk (Neal Stephenson, Octavia E. Butler) to medieval mystics and 'alternative' philosophers (Hildegaard Von Bingen, Eugene Thackerr).
I did find it interesting to read Wilk's take on these subjects...but I do wonder who exactly the readership for these essays might be...and whether I might be the best or the worst target audience (which is something I wondered about her Berlin-set, Creatives-charactered novel, Oval). I must say that I am already familiar with the majority of the books and authors Wilk writes about in this collection. Not that I didn't learn anything or wasn't inspired to seek out the writers I was unfamiliar with (Tricia Sullivan, for example), but I wonder whether a reader who is less familiar with these books and genres (and/or vice versa) would appreciate Death By Landscape?
In the end, what I found most engaging about the collection were the more personal elements—Wilk writing about her own methods and work habits, in particular the genesis of Oval (which included a LARPing session of the book!)—even if, again, I found this relatable on a personal level, as it seemed reflective of some of my own work habits.
Thanks to the author and Soft Skull Press for providing me with an ARC of this book.
If there's a single overlying concept to Death By Landscape, it's a defence of genre writing—the importance of non-mainstream perspective and the utility of alternative or speculative story-telling—as Wilk discusses writers and books from the Old/New Weird (H.P. Lovecraft, Jeff VanderMeer) to body-horror (Jenny Hval, Kathe Koja) to sci-fi/cli-fi (Jonathan Lethem, Michelle Tea) to cyberpunk/solarpunk (Neal Stephenson, Octavia E. Butler) to medieval mystics and 'alternative' philosophers (Hildegaard Von Bingen, Eugene Thackerr).
I did find it interesting to read Wilk's take on these subjects...but I do wonder who exactly the readership for these essays might be...and whether I might be the best or the worst target audience (which is something I wondered about her Berlin-set, Creatives-charactered novel, Oval). I must say that I am already familiar with the majority of the books and authors Wilk writes about in this collection. Not that I didn't learn anything or wasn't inspired to seek out the writers I was unfamiliar with (Tricia Sullivan, for example), but I wonder whether a reader who is less familiar with these books and genres (and/or vice versa) would appreciate Death By Landscape?
In the end, what I found most engaging about the collection were the more personal elements—Wilk writing about her own methods and work habits, in particular the genesis of Oval (which included a LARPing session of the book!)—even if, again, I found this relatable on a personal level, as it seemed reflective of some of my own work habits.
Thanks to the author and Soft Skull Press for providing me with an ARC of this book.
July 12, 2022
DEATH BY LANDSCAPE by Elvia Wilk is a stellar collection of essays! Once I got into this book I couldn’t put it down! These essays discuss women relating to nature, literary works, larping and her writing process. I found every essay extremely interesting! I’d tell you my fave essays but half of them were my faves. Sometimes I find it hard to articulate what I love about a book and that’s the case with this one. I just loved reading it! If you’re looking for you’re next non fiction read then pick this one up! I’m so eager to read Wilk’s novel Oval now! Luckily I checked and my library has it!!
.
Thank you to Soft Skull Press for my gifted review copy!
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Thank you to Soft Skull Press for my gifted review copy!
March 9, 2023
Evidence of a person working hard to find possibilities in an impossible world
June 11, 2025
I don’t think I’ve come across an author recently who’s as adept at weaving together incredibly disparate topics in such a beautiful and strange way. It’s not for everyone, but damn did I find it gorgeous, rich, and haunting. When I reached the last page, I immediately turned back to the first and re-read it all the way through. Would recommend most for my environmental/queer ecologies/extinction/science fiction friends.
Read
February 8, 2023Voor mij gaat het boek over het plezier van graven, het plezier van connectie zoeken en het plezier van het kijken naar onze plek in de wereld, waarom we die plek hebben en of het er eigenlijk wel toe doet om daar over na te denken. Ik kan het iedereen aanraden, de ervaring van het lezen alleen al was bijna meditatief. De rustige manier waarop Elvia Wilk filosofeert en referenties aan elkaar rijgt, openden ook iets bij mij. Het lezen van Death by landscape voelde op veel manieren als ademen, en ik had telkens het gevoel wat meer uitgerust te zijn nadat ik weer een paar pagina's had gelezen. Het boek ging een tijdje lang overal mee naartoe, in mijn jaszak. Dat gevoel ga ik nu missen, maar veel stukken zullen nog lang bij me blijven.
August 24, 2022
Perfection in essay form.
April 10, 2023
It feels like this book was written just for me!
August 14, 2022
Many of the essays collected here are quite brilliant, particularly those relating to fiction and climate change. The shift towards LARPing and performative identities are less compelling, but the collection ends with a moving reflection on working under a pandemic: overall, a tremendously promising work.
July 21, 2022
This book.
I don't know how to write about this book, exactly. At first, I felt as if I were immersed in my summer doctoral classes (Post-Humanism and Dark Ecology), and to be honest, I wish I'd read this book before I'd taken those classes--it would have set the stage for so many smart things we discussed and would have helped boost me a bit in terms of the swirl of jargon that occurs in these courses.
Wilk's book is not aswirl in jargon, but it just as smart, if not more so, as sitting in on these classes. Each essay is a self-contained object and the whole sequence pings against each other in a kind of beautiful rhythm that deeply resonated with me, from the dark exploration of our climate catastrophe to the many ways we get generate material to the awful toll trauma takes on our bodies.
I found myself cheering when she resurrected a book or film or author I loved and making a list of all the material I needed to read / consume because most of what I was familiar with, I love. I appreciated reading these, as if listening to a valuable lecture on a topic I didn't fully know I'd love to consider. I thought so much reading this book, and if I didn't feel the need to quickly get a review out (because it just came out this week, so please, go get a copy!), I would have savored it more.
So: I loved this book so much, I ordered it, even though I was able to read it for free in exchange for a review via NetGalley. I will now get to savor it by reading it again. It's on its way and will live on my shelves, and if you know me, you know that I live with lots of books, but it's precious real estate. This is worth keeping and re-reading for certain. I'm excited to re-read it in a few years when the pandemic is a more distant memory and see how the epilogue sits. I'm excited to see if I've made my own progress in my own work too--productiveness is a great theme of this book, and I have some catching up to do.
I want more like this. Please tell me another is coming soon. I am feeling greedy.
I don't know how to write about this book, exactly. At first, I felt as if I were immersed in my summer doctoral classes (Post-Humanism and Dark Ecology), and to be honest, I wish I'd read this book before I'd taken those classes--it would have set the stage for so many smart things we discussed and would have helped boost me a bit in terms of the swirl of jargon that occurs in these courses.
Wilk's book is not aswirl in jargon, but it just as smart, if not more so, as sitting in on these classes. Each essay is a self-contained object and the whole sequence pings against each other in a kind of beautiful rhythm that deeply resonated with me, from the dark exploration of our climate catastrophe to the many ways we get generate material to the awful toll trauma takes on our bodies.
I found myself cheering when she resurrected a book or film or author I loved and making a list of all the material I needed to read / consume because most of what I was familiar with, I love. I appreciated reading these, as if listening to a valuable lecture on a topic I didn't fully know I'd love to consider. I thought so much reading this book, and if I didn't feel the need to quickly get a review out (because it just came out this week, so please, go get a copy!), I would have savored it more.
So: I loved this book so much, I ordered it, even though I was able to read it for free in exchange for a review via NetGalley. I will now get to savor it by reading it again. It's on its way and will live on my shelves, and if you know me, you know that I live with lots of books, but it's precious real estate. This is worth keeping and re-reading for certain. I'm excited to re-read it in a few years when the pandemic is a more distant memory and see how the epilogue sits. I'm excited to see if I've made my own progress in my own work too--productiveness is a great theme of this book, and I have some catching up to do.
I want more like this. Please tell me another is coming soon. I am feeling greedy.
August 14, 2022
A really compelling set of topics for an essay collection. The first section for me was the strongest, and I wished that the rest of the book had been in a similar vein (I think this is at least partially just that I had incorrect expectations that this whole book would be about climate change posthumanism fiction, which it is not). Some excellent essays in the rest of the book, too, but they move in different directions. A few essays that didn't cohere enough for me. Overall, really solid volume, and it has prompted me to pursue several other texts mentioned herein, which speaks to how good Wilk is at excavating and analyzing something while still keeping me interested in reading it for myself.
4/5
4/5
December 1, 2022
DNF. Was gooooing to finish this book but then I went on Wilk’s Instagram and the latest post was a culinary photo dump from a recent trip to wherever featuring like 7 different seafood dishes and an egg thing and some very not plant-based desserts and I was like WTF how does that square with the post-anthropocentric eco bullshit whatever that this book is supposedly theorizing?
Read
March 14, 2024I found part one of this work, which was an overview of works of fiction depicting metaphorical merging of the human and natural world, to be very interesting. However, the description of the book gives the impression that Wilk is going to be diving into what fiction looks like in a world going extinct. However, climate change and the current sixth mass extinction are seldom mentioned, if at all. Additionally, I am struggling to see how the different parts of this book tie together. It almost reads as three disparate books.
I greatly appreciated the first part, "Plants," which depicted the natural world as both metaphor and independent agent, emerging from the background and becoming inseparable from the foreground. However, she didn't really touch on the extinction of species happening in the natural world. Additionally, part two, "Planets," starts to venture into apocalyptic sci-fi and fantasy fiction, though not in a way that relates to a potential end of the world in actuality, caused by manmade forces, such as the proliferation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Finally, part three, "Bleed," has almost no place in this collection of essays. The final part is a focus on the self and over exaggerated yet ambiguous personal trauma the author has felt in her life. It's almost contradictory to her original message about unity and harmony and a focus on the ecosystem and humans who live in it as a whole. I'm not sure what the author's preoccupation with feeling unspecific trauma in her body has to do with literature in the age of extinction.
All in all, I think Wilk's position on topics discussed and her voice are muddled and unclear in these works. It's not always obvious what the author is trying to say, whether she is reiterating someone else's point, or putting it into question. There doesn't seem to be cohesion between the different topics discussed, and it seems to be lacking an introduction or closing that leaves us with questions about what comes next or a way to make sense of what we just read.
Although this reads more like a catharsis of disjointed thoughts, or almost a way to show off all of the fiction she has read, I did find the first and second parts enjoyable. She had some thought provoking analyses, even if the book reads more like a summary of a very vast collection of short stories and novels. I wish she would have given less examples and expanded upon her ideas in greater detail. She is a skilled writer and has a very abstract way of seeing the world and analyzing fiction. I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to be feeling after reading this, and I am still trying to make sense of how her thoughts tie together and what she was trying to say.
I also think the epilogue was unnecessary, which was sort of like a diary entry of her struggles with productivity and her insistence on her unnamed trauma impacting her life. This seemed entirely self-focused and uninspiring, which again seems contrary to her original message of focus on the environment and connection to otherness. It feels very self-absorbed, despite her attempt to paint a picture of a moment in time where she was feeling things that should be read as relatable.
In summary, I'm glad I read this book, I just think she could have made what she was trying to say clearer and more cohesive.
I greatly appreciated the first part, "Plants," which depicted the natural world as both metaphor and independent agent, emerging from the background and becoming inseparable from the foreground. However, she didn't really touch on the extinction of species happening in the natural world. Additionally, part two, "Planets," starts to venture into apocalyptic sci-fi and fantasy fiction, though not in a way that relates to a potential end of the world in actuality, caused by manmade forces, such as the proliferation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Finally, part three, "Bleed," has almost no place in this collection of essays. The final part is a focus on the self and over exaggerated yet ambiguous personal trauma the author has felt in her life. It's almost contradictory to her original message about unity and harmony and a focus on the ecosystem and humans who live in it as a whole. I'm not sure what the author's preoccupation with feeling unspecific trauma in her body has to do with literature in the age of extinction.
All in all, I think Wilk's position on topics discussed and her voice are muddled and unclear in these works. It's not always obvious what the author is trying to say, whether she is reiterating someone else's point, or putting it into question. There doesn't seem to be cohesion between the different topics discussed, and it seems to be lacking an introduction or closing that leaves us with questions about what comes next or a way to make sense of what we just read.
Although this reads more like a catharsis of disjointed thoughts, or almost a way to show off all of the fiction she has read, I did find the first and second parts enjoyable. She had some thought provoking analyses, even if the book reads more like a summary of a very vast collection of short stories and novels. I wish she would have given less examples and expanded upon her ideas in greater detail. She is a skilled writer and has a very abstract way of seeing the world and analyzing fiction. I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to be feeling after reading this, and I am still trying to make sense of how her thoughts tie together and what she was trying to say.
I also think the epilogue was unnecessary, which was sort of like a diary entry of her struggles with productivity and her insistence on her unnamed trauma impacting her life. This seemed entirely self-focused and uninspiring, which again seems contrary to her original message of focus on the environment and connection to otherness. It feels very self-absorbed, despite her attempt to paint a picture of a moment in time where she was feeling things that should be read as relatable.
In summary, I'm glad I read this book, I just think she could have made what she was trying to say clearer and more cohesive.
November 20, 2022
The blurb on this book is absolutely phenomenal. It promises to explore the relationship between self and environment, the decay of the ecosystem our role in it, and how all of this comes together in modern fiction.
I'm sold on the premise alone.
But not only that I'm promised she will discuss how my faves employ this: Jeff & Ann Vandermeer, Karen Russell, Han Kang, Margaret Atwood!
The first chapter I had some trouble with. It felt less like an essay and more like a collection of.. flash non-fiction? Snippets of larger articles or more fleshed-out essays but nothing explored or deepened by the author's own commentary. More like: a collection of quotes and the beginning of a larger essay.
So, what was touched on in this first 25 pages?
- First: the collective vs the individual, and how that pertains to ecosystems. I was told that ecosystems themselves have somehow moved beyond their definition, no longer are they systems of ecology but now include geology, technology, and planets? Hmm, not sure about that, ecosystems have a definition and it definitely does not include the planets. She then says that there is a new brand of fiction which pertains to these ecosystems and uses Vandermeer's Southern Reach to illustrate this, an example I find perplexing given that that series is all about the slow apocalypse in nature: more a classic example of the classic ecosystem than her new-fangled one.
- Next, there was some stuff about women, their relationship with plants, and something about the evolution of Weird fiction. Fiction-wise, these are my favourite topics, especially the Weird and New Weird which are genres I have been gleefully wallowing in since I found them. I had a good experience with this section for the most part: it talks about the definition of what is weird (something out of place and unsettling in this genre of fiction - which is sometimes classed as uncanny horror) and how what is considered weird has evolved. How women and minorities used to be the weird and how that has changed over the past few decades. I feel like this topic warranted more than a page of quotes, that it's something that really would have benefitted from its own chapter.
- Instead, we move on to something about all bodies being two bodies, where one is itself and one is how it relates to the ecosystem/climate - I found this pretty contrived.
- Then there was a good bit about genre fiction and how some of the more interesting concepts in people vs the environment stay stuck in sci-fi and don't progress to literary fiction. I can't say I think that's true in the 21st century but again would have been happy to see an informed discussion of the topic as opposed to what we got which was a statement-of-fact.
So, after that first chapter I was confused because we'd touched upon topics brought up in essays read by Wilk but not really created any sort of synthesis, any sort of thesis that tied them together. Maybe she was just teasing ideas and the next chapter would flesh stuff out? I read on..
Unfortunately the next chapter just pissed me off.
Wilk does not flesh the concepts out from the previous chapter but instead starts something new. She writes about a study from 10 years ago which correlated a link between the ibis bird sexuality and mercury contamination in their habitat. The study took birds and gave them varying doses of mercury from hatchling to adult and monitored their behaviour. There was a significant correlation between exposure and male-male pair bonding in the ibis.
To me this demonstrated that human's contamination of the ecosystem can have real consequences on it, including changing behaviours in animals that are less obvious. The levels are mercury are not fatal, it's not the encephalitis-style mania of the hatters at play but something more subtle.
But no, this is what she writes (snippets from across a page):
Where to begin?
Whilst reading this I felt truly angry. Is the author this scientifically illiterate, does she lack the logical faculties to piece together why the ibis bird situation is a problem? Let's go through it.
Reproductive success is indeed the ultimate definition of success in terms of the survival of the species, that's Darwin - not God. And NO, that logic doesn't pertain to an individual person - why? Because that person is more than a bird. That person is sentient, is self-actualizing, is more than their biology. That is why we are unique. Reproductive success, overall, IS important to humankind as a species - but choosing to go childfree or being reproductively unlucky is not going to kill our species in a world that is vastly overpopulated.
We are unique in our ecosystem, and that is why we have an obligation to act as stewards to our environment. The ibis story matters because we are influencing the behaviour of an animal on incredibly fast timescales - unnaturally fast timescales that could break up delicate food webs and may ultimately affect us in the long run. The fact that it makes the birds gay isn't the point! Mallards, your bog-standard duck, is super gay! Penguins - really gay! But Ibis? Not really. We changed their behaviour by altering their brain chemistry. Unintentionally changed it with pollutants. THAT is the point. Conflating that with moralizing queerness is frankly insulting to both the marginalized and the conservationists.
Systems change, evolve. The reason why what is "clean" vs "toxic" is "constantly in flux" is because science is all about checking and rechecking data and assumptions and expanding our model of how the world works. Behind every newspaper headline is a study, be it generational, yea-long, month-long in humans/rats/fruit flies that tries to answer a specific question and provides its answer with a degree of uncertainty. Sometimes a later study reveals the previous study was wrong. With new data, and new analysis, the situation is reassessed. Scientists, and the media, aren't trying to hoodwink you: they're telling you what we know at the moment.
Exploring how this manifests in the arts is fascinating and I was really looking forward to a book about it. But the ibis thing? That really made me lose all trust for this author.
I might try and pick it up again when I feel less mad and try and focus on the arty/lit bits.
DNF'd at pg. 35.
I'm sold on the premise alone.
But not only that I'm promised she will discuss how my faves employ this: Jeff & Ann Vandermeer, Karen Russell, Han Kang, Margaret Atwood!
The first chapter I had some trouble with. It felt less like an essay and more like a collection of.. flash non-fiction? Snippets of larger articles or more fleshed-out essays but nothing explored or deepened by the author's own commentary. More like: a collection of quotes and the beginning of a larger essay.
So, what was touched on in this first 25 pages?
- First: the collective vs the individual, and how that pertains to ecosystems. I was told that ecosystems themselves have somehow moved beyond their definition, no longer are they systems of ecology but now include geology, technology, and planets? Hmm, not sure about that, ecosystems have a definition and it definitely does not include the planets. She then says that there is a new brand of fiction which pertains to these ecosystems and uses Vandermeer's Southern Reach to illustrate this, an example I find perplexing given that that series is all about the slow apocalypse in nature: more a classic example of the classic ecosystem than her new-fangled one.
- Next, there was some stuff about women, their relationship with plants, and something about the evolution of Weird fiction. Fiction-wise, these are my favourite topics, especially the Weird and New Weird which are genres I have been gleefully wallowing in since I found them. I had a good experience with this section for the most part: it talks about the definition of what is weird (something out of place and unsettling in this genre of fiction - which is sometimes classed as uncanny horror) and how what is considered weird has evolved. How women and minorities used to be the weird and how that has changed over the past few decades. I feel like this topic warranted more than a page of quotes, that it's something that really would have benefitted from its own chapter.
- Instead, we move on to something about all bodies being two bodies, where one is itself and one is how it relates to the ecosystem/climate - I found this pretty contrived.
- Then there was a good bit about genre fiction and how some of the more interesting concepts in people vs the environment stay stuck in sci-fi and don't progress to literary fiction. I can't say I think that's true in the 21st century but again would have been happy to see an informed discussion of the topic as opposed to what we got which was a statement-of-fact.
So, after that first chapter I was confused because we'd touched upon topics brought up in essays read by Wilk but not really created any sort of synthesis, any sort of thesis that tied them together. Maybe she was just teasing ideas and the next chapter would flesh stuff out? I read on..
Unfortunately the next chapter just pissed me off.
Wilk does not flesh the concepts out from the previous chapter but instead starts something new. She writes about a study from 10 years ago which correlated a link between the ibis bird sexuality and mercury contamination in their habitat. The study took birds and gave them varying doses of mercury from hatchling to adult and monitored their behaviour. There was a significant correlation between exposure and male-male pair bonding in the ibis.
To me this demonstrated that human's contamination of the ecosystem can have real consequences on it, including changing behaviours in animals that are less obvious. The levels are mercury are not fatal, it's not the encephalitis-style mania of the hatters at play but something more subtle.
But no, this is what she writes (snippets from across a page):
Aligned with the toxic and the unnatural, the birds are anthropomorphized and their sexualities moralized according to human biases, their gayness takes as proof that their environment is poisonous.
[...]
Perhaps the gay bird are enjoying their new carefree, childless lifestyles. Perhaps some of these birds find aspects of preduction a burden. [...] From whose perspective is reproductive success the ultimate definition of success? God's, Darwin's, ecologists', or the animals'?
[...]
Why [is] bird sexuality any of our business? It's true that birds have not had a choice in the matter - but then again, who does? Most people on the planet absorb a number of extrememly toxic pollutants without prior consent too.
[...]
Ideas about what is clean vs toxic are constantly in flux. One day a newspaper touts the benefits of chocolate and red wine in moderation; the next it touts abstinence.
Where to begin?
Whilst reading this I felt truly angry. Is the author this scientifically illiterate, does she lack the logical faculties to piece together why the ibis bird situation is a problem? Let's go through it.
Reproductive success is indeed the ultimate definition of success in terms of the survival of the species, that's Darwin - not God. And NO, that logic doesn't pertain to an individual person - why? Because that person is more than a bird. That person is sentient, is self-actualizing, is more than their biology. That is why we are unique. Reproductive success, overall, IS important to humankind as a species - but choosing to go childfree or being reproductively unlucky is not going to kill our species in a world that is vastly overpopulated.
We are unique in our ecosystem, and that is why we have an obligation to act as stewards to our environment. The ibis story matters because we are influencing the behaviour of an animal on incredibly fast timescales - unnaturally fast timescales that could break up delicate food webs and may ultimately affect us in the long run. The fact that it makes the birds gay isn't the point! Mallards, your bog-standard duck, is super gay! Penguins - really gay! But Ibis? Not really. We changed their behaviour by altering their brain chemistry. Unintentionally changed it with pollutants. THAT is the point. Conflating that with moralizing queerness is frankly insulting to both the marginalized and the conservationists.
Systems change, evolve. The reason why what is "clean" vs "toxic" is "constantly in flux" is because science is all about checking and rechecking data and assumptions and expanding our model of how the world works. Behind every newspaper headline is a study, be it generational, yea-long, month-long in humans/rats/fruit flies that tries to answer a specific question and provides its answer with a degree of uncertainty. Sometimes a later study reveals the previous study was wrong. With new data, and new analysis, the situation is reassessed. Scientists, and the media, aren't trying to hoodwink you: they're telling you what we know at the moment.
Exploring how this manifests in the arts is fascinating and I was really looking forward to a book about it. But the ibis thing? That really made me lose all trust for this author.
I might try and pick it up again when I feel less mad and try and focus on the arty/lit bits.
DNF'd at pg. 35.
April 24, 2025
Medieval mystic nuns, plastic-induced homoerotic behavior in birds, and CIA investigations into plant sentience all feature in Elivia Wilk’s wonderfully crafted collection of essays as she meditates on the shortcomings of Cartesian thought, remedies of fiction, and her own inseparable experiences.
Wilk balances this breadth of subject matter with the connectivity of questions they pose. She walks a fine line between creating understandable and concise works about ideas whose definitions, at times, create tension within the medium she is working in and the idea of definitions themselves.
Some of these essays work better than others but as a whole they were enjoyable and approachable. She maintains a generally conversational tone and structure, except for a couple sections where she will do something like insistently using “verisimilitude” at least once on every page.
What I really enjoyed most was her approach to the collection structure. Her arrangement of the essays promotes her ideas of transitional, wholistic, and experiential reading and thought with segues that, if not seamless, were funny and concluded with a meaningful and sweet send-off.
This was a great gift from Drew who saw all of the books cited that I had read and knew there was more in here that I would want to read.
Wilk balances this breadth of subject matter with the connectivity of questions they pose. She walks a fine line between creating understandable and concise works about ideas whose definitions, at times, create tension within the medium she is working in and the idea of definitions themselves.
Some of these essays work better than others but as a whole they were enjoyable and approachable. She maintains a generally conversational tone and structure, except for a couple sections where she will do something like insistently using “verisimilitude” at least once on every page.
What I really enjoyed most was her approach to the collection structure. Her arrangement of the essays promotes her ideas of transitional, wholistic, and experiential reading and thought with segues that, if not seamless, were funny and concluded with a meaningful and sweet send-off.
This was a great gift from Drew who saw all of the books cited that I had read and knew there was more in here that I would want to read.
August 27, 2022
I have a problem where I pick up books I know nothing about simply because I hear someone talking about them and my curiosity must be satiated. For this one, I was moving my car from the driveway to the street, literally less than 30 seconds, and happened to have the radio tuned to an NPR interview with the author of Death by Landscape, Elvia Wilk, and decided right then and there I should probably check this book out.
9 times out of 10 this is a mistake, and I'm really trying my best to stop doing this, but in this case I was really surprised by what I found. I think I probably highlighted about half of this entire book, which starts off with an oppressively academic discussion about climate change and the end of time, and then moves into essays and reflections on various authors and their work related to cli-fi, the roles of fantasy and science fiction in a world tearing itself apart, solarpunk, EMDR, virtual reality, larping and the power of stories to reshape global narratives. I learned a great deal about a handful of things that otherwise would not normally cross my path, which is always a treat in this age of information overload coupled with echo chamber anxiety.
A couple of my favorite lines:
From James Baldwin, "it has always been much easier to give a name to the evil without than to locate the terror within."
From Daisy Hildyard, "in the era of climate change people have developed two bodies... an individual body in which you exist, eat, sleep and go about your day-to-day life, and a second body which has an impact on foreign countries and on whales. The first body is the one you familiarly refer to when you go to work or have sex or feel a headache coming on. I might call the second body the ecosystemic body - the one that is constantly implicated in and influenced by ecologies beyond the individual self."
From William Gibson, "the future is already here, it is just unevenly distributed."
From Rob Nixon's description of 'slow violence', "The biggest disasters are the ones that are never identified as such, those occurrences, like gradual environmental devastation, that disproportionately affect those without a megaphone, and which are not deemed newsworthy because they are not sensational single events."
"Single-order solutionism implies that a good solution for what ails one person is good for every person, which is clearly not the case in a deeply unequal world. And it suggests that what is good for people is also good for the planet, when the best-case scenarios for the wealthy, the poor, and the planetary ecosystem are regularly at odds with one another. People as a species have not proven to be particularly good for the planet, and solar panels can't undo that fact."
9 times out of 10 this is a mistake, and I'm really trying my best to stop doing this, but in this case I was really surprised by what I found. I think I probably highlighted about half of this entire book, which starts off with an oppressively academic discussion about climate change and the end of time, and then moves into essays and reflections on various authors and their work related to cli-fi, the roles of fantasy and science fiction in a world tearing itself apart, solarpunk, EMDR, virtual reality, larping and the power of stories to reshape global narratives. I learned a great deal about a handful of things that otherwise would not normally cross my path, which is always a treat in this age of information overload coupled with echo chamber anxiety.
A couple of my favorite lines:
From James Baldwin, "it has always been much easier to give a name to the evil without than to locate the terror within."
From Daisy Hildyard, "in the era of climate change people have developed two bodies... an individual body in which you exist, eat, sleep and go about your day-to-day life, and a second body which has an impact on foreign countries and on whales. The first body is the one you familiarly refer to when you go to work or have sex or feel a headache coming on. I might call the second body the ecosystemic body - the one that is constantly implicated in and influenced by ecologies beyond the individual self."
From William Gibson, "the future is already here, it is just unevenly distributed."
From Rob Nixon's description of 'slow violence', "The biggest disasters are the ones that are never identified as such, those occurrences, like gradual environmental devastation, that disproportionately affect those without a megaphone, and which are not deemed newsworthy because they are not sensational single events."
"Single-order solutionism implies that a good solution for what ails one person is good for every person, which is clearly not the case in a deeply unequal world. And it suggests that what is good for people is also good for the planet, when the best-case scenarios for the wealthy, the poor, and the planetary ecosystem are regularly at odds with one another. People as a species have not proven to be particularly good for the planet, and solar panels can't undo that fact."
January 31, 2024
Elvia's writing started with so much promise but only delivered at the tail section of the collection when she talked about her personal experiences during covid, or when she tried to get closure from a break up by writing a book. These essays were amazing, the others however were something else.
The book blurb described the collection as about "love, death, plants, and weird fiction." Weird is well represented. There were essays which I didn't even know what they are about the only thing I could say for sure is that they have a suspect grasp on reality. I will not call these ones genius, in fact I felt that they were a moving target that kept name checking authors and book's I have never heard of on subjects that I have no interest in. Maybe I wasn't the target audience on these. Some new age weird tree hugging...
Still Elvia is a very talented writer and I would have preferred more on her personal stories to robots feeding on their creator's fingers and still finding the sacrifice unworthy, if you are into that kind of thing, this collection is for you
The book blurb described the collection as about "love, death, plants, and weird fiction." Weird is well represented. There were essays which I didn't even know what they are about the only thing I could say for sure is that they have a suspect grasp on reality. I will not call these ones genius, in fact I felt that they were a moving target that kept name checking authors and book's I have never heard of on subjects that I have no interest in. Maybe I wasn't the target audience on these. Some new age weird tree hugging...
Still Elvia is a very talented writer and I would have preferred more on her personal stories to robots feeding on their creator's fingers and still finding the sacrifice unworthy, if you are into that kind of thing, this collection is for you
September 1, 2023
Wow I just loved this book so much. Like sooo much. Tw annoying and cringe: I felt SEEN AS HELL by this book, especially that essay abt therapy/body responses and also when she was talking abt thinking abt yourself in third person so that whoever was narrating your life would have an easier time
But seriously - what a good read. So much to think abt & such wide ground covered. The section on plants was great, made me think a lot abt urban ecology which I’m excited to get into, & such a great canon of literature mentioned to dive into. I enjoyed reading this so much, and I like the way Elvia Wilk writes - it feels like prioritizing function over flourish in an awesome utilitarian & cool way
Erotics of rot hmmmm
But seriously - what a good read. So much to think abt & such wide ground covered. The section on plants was great, made me think a lot abt urban ecology which I’m excited to get into, & such a great canon of literature mentioned to dive into. I enjoyed reading this so much, and I like the way Elvia Wilk writes - it feels like prioritizing function over flourish in an awesome utilitarian & cool way
Erotics of rot hmmmm
October 16, 2023
The book seems heavily loaded with denser essays at front, but ending the second section, the essay on black holes, desire, silence, and metaphor is where I began to get invested. At times the references seemed needlessly packed in almost to the point of obscuring the author’s own thoughts, but I’ve also found myself thinking about the texts Wilk uses since finishing the book. An ambitious and often successful project, if sometimes one that appears to be striving
May 20, 2024
Wow, this book is like someone took a cuttings from me and cultivated a bunch of my scrambled thoughts into a beautiful series of essays. Not at all what I expected (climate, myth, ecology) because it also included Catholicism, mysticism, and dystopia. A must read if you are writing dystopia or sci-fi post-quarantine.
April 26, 2025
Was recommended this book by Mira, it had a couple of interesting thoughts but unfortunately I was reading it alongside a David Foster Wallace collection of essays and any normie’s writing next to DFW will feel somewhat dilettante. She wrote somewhat intelligently about larping but that essay left something to be desired. Also I’m sick to death of pandemic essays.
November 27, 2023
3.5 - essay collection generally about climate change, humans, art, things ending and falling apart.
there were some gems in here that i want to re-read.
there were some that were eh give or take didn't hit as hard.
Essay collections are hard like that !!!!!
there were some gems in here that i want to re-read.
there were some that were eh give or take didn't hit as hard.
Essay collections are hard like that !!!!!
April 25, 2024
Some very smart and beautiful essays about living and writing in our times.
August 27, 2024
I just couldn’t connect with the way the author made points or the writing style
March 23, 2023
I liked the personal essays and the "weird vs eerie" distinction. She made larping seem interesting but imo still too embarrassing to try
August 14, 2022
Like the protagonist of Margaret Atwood's short story Death by Landscape, the writer and essayist Elvia Wilk distrusts the popular perception vis-à-vis the non-human (and non-animal) species that we share the planet with. In fact, her essays invite the reader to consider then doubt a litany of premises underlying the modern (yet often painfully outdated) beliefs.
The collection opens with essays that research, contemplate, and challenge how we perceive plants and nature. Drawing ideas and stories from the New Weird literary movement and authors such as Jeff VanderMeer, Richard Powers, and Emanuele Coccia, Wilk builds a solid case for seeing ourselves as particles not masters of this universe. Could not agree more.
While the book is short of 300 pages, the essays previously published in The Paris Review, Granta, and Bookforum among others, manage to raise several important if haunting questions. "If depression can be understood as the sensation of futurelessness, it is not only a sensible reaction to but a product of a world lacking a future?" Wilk mercilessly asks.
Or… What is the role of art or fiction in the age of climate change? Should it offer solutions or hope or inject fear and horror? Should literature be politicized? Unlike many authors, Wilk makes the effort to arrive at an answer (or, in one case, admits that she doesn't know one). "What fictions can do, regardless of how dystopian or utopian they may seem, is to identify how the interests of different people and different species conflict – as well as to highlight the areas of the Venn diagram where they do overlap."
I enjoyed the first half of the book more – I found the essays on climate change and plant agency more relevant to our times and fascinating in their own right – and would recommend the book to anyone looking for fresh, healthy (or healing?) perspectives to living in a world full of that which, as quoted by Wilk, Rob Nixon calls "slow violence."
The collection opens with essays that research, contemplate, and challenge how we perceive plants and nature. Drawing ideas and stories from the New Weird literary movement and authors such as Jeff VanderMeer, Richard Powers, and Emanuele Coccia, Wilk builds a solid case for seeing ourselves as particles not masters of this universe. Could not agree more.
While the book is short of 300 pages, the essays previously published in The Paris Review, Granta, and Bookforum among others, manage to raise several important if haunting questions. "If depression can be understood as the sensation of futurelessness, it is not only a sensible reaction to but a product of a world lacking a future?" Wilk mercilessly asks.
Or… What is the role of art or fiction in the age of climate change? Should it offer solutions or hope or inject fear and horror? Should literature be politicized? Unlike many authors, Wilk makes the effort to arrive at an answer (or, in one case, admits that she doesn't know one). "What fictions can do, regardless of how dystopian or utopian they may seem, is to identify how the interests of different people and different species conflict – as well as to highlight the areas of the Venn diagram where they do overlap."
I enjoyed the first half of the book more – I found the essays on climate change and plant agency more relevant to our times and fascinating in their own right – and would recommend the book to anyone looking for fresh, healthy (or healing?) perspectives to living in a world full of that which, as quoted by Wilk, Rob Nixon calls "slow violence."
July 29, 2023
‘Only Saint John the Baptist, the beheaded megasaint, stares directly out of his frame at the viewer. — Lucia’s own eyes were said to have been plucked or maybe stabbed out. She is the patron saint of eyesight because of this grisly martyrdom. — Your pain and hers, back and forth. Ouch, ouch. I love Lucia. I love the weirdness of her extra eyes — .’
Enjoyed the first half a lot more than the second.
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