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Katja's World Game
It is 2022. What can Katja and her five friends, all students at a university in Bath, do to turn the tables and save life on Earth from imminent destruction?
Is technology the solution, or our downfall? The past and present are intertwined as the six students - from China, Iran, Northern Ireland, Norway, The Gambia and the USA - try to make sense of their world and save what can be saved.
The story Katja tells is not only her own - it is also ours. It is a story of fear, despair and anger - but also of hope and love.
Katja's World Game is the first novel in a trilogy that explores the natural world, the supernatural, and the world of stories and video games.
Jane Ekstam is Professor of English Literature at Østfold University College, Norway. Born in southern England and now living in Sweden, she is passionate about preserving the environment for future generations. Jane enjoys her daily walk in the forest close to her home and loves walking by the canal. She lives with her husband, Kjell, and has three daughters.
Is technology the solution, or our downfall? The past and present are intertwined as the six students - from China, Iran, Northern Ireland, Norway, The Gambia and the USA - try to make sense of their world and save what can be saved.
The story Katja tells is not only her own - it is also ours. It is a story of fear, despair and anger - but also of hope and love.
Katja's World Game is the first novel in a trilogy that explores the natural world, the supernatural, and the world of stories and video games.
Jane Ekstam is Professor of English Literature at Østfold University College, Norway. Born in southern England and now living in Sweden, she is passionate about preserving the environment for future generations. Jane enjoys her daily walk in the forest close to her home and loves walking by the canal. She lives with her husband, Kjell, and has three daughters.
372 pages, Kindle Edition
Published June 6, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
September 27, 2022
Katja’s World Game is the story of a nineteen-year-old girl in her first year at university in England who finds herself singled out to lead the fight against climate change. Set in the present of 2022, and in the city of Bath, this young adult novel combines realistic details of everyday life with fantasy elements reminiscent of the Harry Potter books and His Dark Materials. Bath Spa University, where Katja studies on a course in creative writing with a specialisation in climate change and the environment, takes the place of Hogwarts and Jordan College Oxford. Katja has dreams in which she is visited by mysterious good and evil forces, and gains access to a parallel universe. Like the books of J.K. Rowling and Philip Pullman, this is also a coming of age story. Reluctantly, because it takes over her life, calls for courage and demands personal sacrifices, Katja accepts the mission she is given to lead a group of students in the struggle to persuade the public to recognise the future impact of climate change and accept the need to change their way of life.
Her older sister, who works in environmental management for the National Trust, joins a direct action group and is arrested for blocking a road, but Katja’s approach to the environmental situation is less political and more creative. Together with friends and family she produces a dance show whose central message is the need to work together to reduce carbon emissions and halt the sixth extinction. Her boyfriend teaches her Contact Improvisation, a form of dance devised in the 1970s which involves the exploration of one’s body in relation to others, using the fundamentals of sharing weight, touch and movement awareness. It is described as “working together, being sensitive to your partner’s needs, weighing up the situation and moving forward at a controlled pace that also allows for improvisation” (p. 236). With its focus on partnership, trust and spontaneity, contact improvisation provides a model for the socio-political cohesion which global climate action demands. At the same time, Katja’s group, which includes her younger brother, a gaming whizzkid, alongside fellow students of Katja’s from America, Northern Ireland, Iran, the Gambia and China, takes the first steps in creating an elaborate computer game which will spread their socio-environmental message.
Communicating the facts of environmental change and motivating readers to take action are key aims of climate fiction. Skill is required of the author if info-dumping is to be avoided, and a balance must be struck between stoking anxiety about the future and fostering hope that change can be achieved in time to prevent disaster. Knowledge is often imparted by scientist figures or discovered by researching journalists. Here, Katja learns about the causes and consequences of climate change as part of her university course, which also teaches her to understand the potential of creative writing, art and performance to move audiences and contribute to the necessary shift in public opinion. She is also instructed and encouraged telepathically by her course director, who has mysterious knowledge and powers, her deceased Norwegian grandfather, whose actions in the Resistance in the Second World War make him a role model, and an ancient oak tree, with which she has a special relationship. Fantasies about nature speaking to us are a quasi-universal feature of human cultures. Katja’s World Game is indebted to the popularisation by Peter Wohlleben and others of scientific research into how trees communicate with each other in cooperative ways which was carried out in the 1990s by the Canadian forestry ecologist Suzanne Simard, and Simard’s concept of ‘mother trees’. Ekstam develops these recently discovered, fascinating facts about plant communication into trees being linked with individuals, speaking telepathically to them, and imparting knowledge about the future. These fantasy elements, which distinguish Katja’s World Game from other young adult cli-fi such as Saci Lloyd’s The Carbon Diaries 2015 and Emmi Itäranta’s Memory of Water, run the risk of undermining the physical and social realities of the environmental crisis, and may not be to everyone’s taste. But they are likely to appeal to many young readers: a quick Google search shows that fantasy cli-fi is a flourishing field. Ekstam’s novel is in any case solidly grounded in fact, and includes reading tips at the end – divided into the categories of literary and non-literary (= environmental) titles.
Another weakness of the literature of climate change is that it can be crudely didactic: simple solutions to complex problems are sometimes advocated and environmental concern is presented as a moral imperative. Young people, who see the environment being taken away from them by their elders, are depicted as all prepared to give things up and stop consuming resources. Jane Ekstam’s book does not entirely avoid this pitfall: we are told humans have “steadily destroyed the balance of the planet”, and the sixth extinction is “the fault of those [humans] who place greed above all else”. However, there is a great deal more to Katja’s World Game than this suggests. Ekstam builds on (and alludes in passing to) the teenage commitment evidenced in the ‘Fridays for Future’ school strike movement. But her narrative is shaped by belief in the efficacy of telling stories as a way of engaging the subject as well as informing them. It seeks to promote a sense of global environmental citizenship by describing the thoughts, feelings and experiences of a teenage girl who is inspired to take a stand against environmental destruction and draws strength from two sources: a member of her family who demonstrated similar principles and courage in the past, and a tree with which she has an imagined bond.
I found Ekstam’s novel slow to start, but it grows in complexity as the narrative develops, providing information on planetary history, mass extinctions and climate change, using contact improvisation as a model for the future human/ human and human/plant relations, and conveying the messages that collaboration (including interspecies collaboration) is a prerequisite for continuing life on earth, that love and friendship are needed to sustain hope and action, and that laments on environmental destruction must be coupled with anger if they are to have an impact. It raises challenging questions about the uses of artificial intelligence and whether creative writing, performance and green gaming can influence the public perception of and response to climate change. I was hooked by the building tension in Katja’s efforts to balance the right to a personal life and the demands of academic study against the obligation to become involved in different kinds of climate action. Katja’s World Game: The Game Begins closes with the end of Katja’s first year at university. I’ll be looking out for the publication of volumes two and three of the trilogy.
Her older sister, who works in environmental management for the National Trust, joins a direct action group and is arrested for blocking a road, but Katja’s approach to the environmental situation is less political and more creative. Together with friends and family she produces a dance show whose central message is the need to work together to reduce carbon emissions and halt the sixth extinction. Her boyfriend teaches her Contact Improvisation, a form of dance devised in the 1970s which involves the exploration of one’s body in relation to others, using the fundamentals of sharing weight, touch and movement awareness. It is described as “working together, being sensitive to your partner’s needs, weighing up the situation and moving forward at a controlled pace that also allows for improvisation” (p. 236). With its focus on partnership, trust and spontaneity, contact improvisation provides a model for the socio-political cohesion which global climate action demands. At the same time, Katja’s group, which includes her younger brother, a gaming whizzkid, alongside fellow students of Katja’s from America, Northern Ireland, Iran, the Gambia and China, takes the first steps in creating an elaborate computer game which will spread their socio-environmental message.
Communicating the facts of environmental change and motivating readers to take action are key aims of climate fiction. Skill is required of the author if info-dumping is to be avoided, and a balance must be struck between stoking anxiety about the future and fostering hope that change can be achieved in time to prevent disaster. Knowledge is often imparted by scientist figures or discovered by researching journalists. Here, Katja learns about the causes and consequences of climate change as part of her university course, which also teaches her to understand the potential of creative writing, art and performance to move audiences and contribute to the necessary shift in public opinion. She is also instructed and encouraged telepathically by her course director, who has mysterious knowledge and powers, her deceased Norwegian grandfather, whose actions in the Resistance in the Second World War make him a role model, and an ancient oak tree, with which she has a special relationship. Fantasies about nature speaking to us are a quasi-universal feature of human cultures. Katja’s World Game is indebted to the popularisation by Peter Wohlleben and others of scientific research into how trees communicate with each other in cooperative ways which was carried out in the 1990s by the Canadian forestry ecologist Suzanne Simard, and Simard’s concept of ‘mother trees’. Ekstam develops these recently discovered, fascinating facts about plant communication into trees being linked with individuals, speaking telepathically to them, and imparting knowledge about the future. These fantasy elements, which distinguish Katja’s World Game from other young adult cli-fi such as Saci Lloyd’s The Carbon Diaries 2015 and Emmi Itäranta’s Memory of Water, run the risk of undermining the physical and social realities of the environmental crisis, and may not be to everyone’s taste. But they are likely to appeal to many young readers: a quick Google search shows that fantasy cli-fi is a flourishing field. Ekstam’s novel is in any case solidly grounded in fact, and includes reading tips at the end – divided into the categories of literary and non-literary (= environmental) titles.
Another weakness of the literature of climate change is that it can be crudely didactic: simple solutions to complex problems are sometimes advocated and environmental concern is presented as a moral imperative. Young people, who see the environment being taken away from them by their elders, are depicted as all prepared to give things up and stop consuming resources. Jane Ekstam’s book does not entirely avoid this pitfall: we are told humans have “steadily destroyed the balance of the planet”, and the sixth extinction is “the fault of those [humans] who place greed above all else”. However, there is a great deal more to Katja’s World Game than this suggests. Ekstam builds on (and alludes in passing to) the teenage commitment evidenced in the ‘Fridays for Future’ school strike movement. But her narrative is shaped by belief in the efficacy of telling stories as a way of engaging the subject as well as informing them. It seeks to promote a sense of global environmental citizenship by describing the thoughts, feelings and experiences of a teenage girl who is inspired to take a stand against environmental destruction and draws strength from two sources: a member of her family who demonstrated similar principles and courage in the past, and a tree with which she has an imagined bond.
I found Ekstam’s novel slow to start, but it grows in complexity as the narrative develops, providing information on planetary history, mass extinctions and climate change, using contact improvisation as a model for the future human/ human and human/plant relations, and conveying the messages that collaboration (including interspecies collaboration) is a prerequisite for continuing life on earth, that love and friendship are needed to sustain hope and action, and that laments on environmental destruction must be coupled with anger if they are to have an impact. It raises challenging questions about the uses of artificial intelligence and whether creative writing, performance and green gaming can influence the public perception of and response to climate change. I was hooked by the building tension in Katja’s efforts to balance the right to a personal life and the demands of academic study against the obligation to become involved in different kinds of climate action. Katja’s World Game: The Game Begins closes with the end of Katja’s first year at university. I’ll be looking out for the publication of volumes two and three of the trilogy.
November 10, 2022
I don't read YA fiction, but when I learned of the theme of Katja's World Game, I dove in.
This first book in a series brings freshman university students from 6 countries together in Bath, England. Little do they know that unseen forces--and two mysterious mentors--have a plan for them. They share an interest in the climate crisis that's affecting each of their countries. But as they study and learn about each other--and their shared concerns about vanishing biodiversity as well as hardships that humans face--a common commitment to developing solutions grows and binds this diverse group together.
Yes, the story is about saving the planet's natural systems; moreover, it's about the importance of inclusion, creativity, working in partnership with others, and believing in yourself and committing to do what's right.
I recommend you read Katja's World Game, an empowering story for young readers and old alike.
This first book in a series brings freshman university students from 6 countries together in Bath, England. Little do they know that unseen forces--and two mysterious mentors--have a plan for them. They share an interest in the climate crisis that's affecting each of their countries. But as they study and learn about each other--and their shared concerns about vanishing biodiversity as well as hardships that humans face--a common commitment to developing solutions grows and binds this diverse group together.
Yes, the story is about saving the planet's natural systems; moreover, it's about the importance of inclusion, creativity, working in partnership with others, and believing in yourself and committing to do what's right.
I recommend you read Katja's World Game, an empowering story for young readers and old alike.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews