Le Guin’s novel The Lathe of Heaven reflects some of the cultural anxiety of that period in its exploration of a future in which war and ecological disaster are constants, but the novel also reflects Le Guin’s lifelong interest in exploring the fine line between dystopian and utopian alternatives to the world we live in.

Reading J. G. Ballard’s 1962 novel The Drowned World was like immersing myself in the eco-dystopian equivalent of a film noir version of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Infused with Ballard’s own interpretations and embellishments on Freudian and Jungian psychology, The Drowned World explores what happens to the human psyche when faced with environmental collapse.

While reading Richard Powers’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Overstory (2015), I can almost feel the light of this great American novel pierce my soul, refracted through the spores and dust floating in the forest air, disturbed by my feet as I tread across the novel’s loamy pages.