Journeys into the underworld (κατάβασις in ancient Greek) fascinate us both in myth and reality. We can read about such journeys in nearly every cultural and religious tradition, from ancient Mesopotamian myths to modern Christianity to the high fantasy of J.R.R. Tolkien to contemporary rescue stories about people trapped underground. Attentive to these many stories, Robert Macfarlane’s Underland: A Deep Time Journey (2019) takes readers below the surface of the Earth…

You might recall the 2018 film directed by Alex Garland and starring Natalie Portman and Oscar Isaac, which is solidly in the genre of science fiction and body horror; well, Annihilation the novel by Jeff VanderMeer is almost completely different and thankfully much better because it plays within the psychological realm rather than in horror (although some claim the movie is better). I’m not going to compare the two here (that’s already been done)—my focus is on what makes VanderMeer’s novel interesting to me from an environmental literature perspective.

Many books discussing the planet’s future lean towards doom and gloom, emphasizing rising temperatures and the potentially catastrophic consequences of allowing temperatures to keep rising. Not so with What If We Get It Right? (2024), an anthology edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, that approaches the task of charting visions of the future that emphasize the optimistic outcomes that could occur if we make positive changes in policy and behavior. Books that help us to envision a better future are crucial because they help motivate us to take positive action—if we can imagine it, we can take steps to create it.