The AI ethicist Eleanor Drage believes that to thrive alongside artificial intelligence, humans need to recognise AI’s “humanity”. She means that while we often speak of AI as though it were some mystical, formless thing, it is the product of hours of human labour, in silicon and quartz mines, microchip factories and data labelling centres. If citizens want to wrest power from the tech companies that are building AI, it helps to understand clearly what they are selling us. This also means seeing through the marketing and hype: “the cloud”, that nebulous, distant place where your photos are stored, is just someone else’s computer; an AI “hallucination” is a system error or data labelling mistake; intelligence is a very broad – and potentially misleading – term.

The story in Silicon Valley is that AI will either save us, ushering in a new era of prosperity and human longevity, or it will wipe us all out. Drage argues, convincingly, that big tech cannot possibly deliver on its utopian promises while it continues to chase profit and power above all else, and while it serves the interests of a narrow few. Meanwhile, the cultural obsession with the AI-induced apocalypse conveniently redirects attention from the practical conversations we could be having about how to make AI safer – by ensuring citizens have more power over how their information is used, and how AI models are trained and regulated, for example. Tech titans’ apocalyptic visions also create the false impression that AI safety is more important than climate change, geopolitical tensions and inequality, three problems that are already causing a huge amount of suffering and that, if addressed, would reduce many AI-linked risks too.

Drage, an assistant research professor at the University of Cambridge’s Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, has conducted research that debunks AI-powered recruitment processes, and exposes the dangers of incorporating AI into law enforcement. Many of her criticisms of big tech will be familiar: that AI algorithms perpetuate and entrench pre-existing biases; that for all their bland, generic promises to be “transparent” and “accountable”, tech giants have become too big to care about ethics; that a handful of executives have amassed far too much power; and that the rollout of AI is happening without our consent and without consideration for planetary health. But her writing has intellectual heft, and her philosophical explorations of, for example, how we define intelligence and why this matters, are very interesting.

Occasionally, however, Drage’s arguments seem rushed and become sloppy. “It’s merely an illusion that the labour force is disappearing: work is simply shifting, from artists to data labellers and from marketeers to engineers,” she writes at one point. But it’s not clear that artists and “marketeers” will become redundant in the coming AI era. It’s also not as though the data labellers working for poverty wages in Kenya would have been artists 10 years ago. Equally, given the importance she rightly places on promoting diversity in AI, it’s disappointing that she dismisses unconscious bias as “merely another way of taking the perspective of the perpetrator rather than the recipient of harm”, as though intention is completely irrelevant. She writes that people are ready for “less placid” conversations about equality, I’d add that these conversations also demand accuracy and nuance.

The book’s title suggests Drage wants to offer an alternative vision of what AI could be. She gives a few examples of the kind of ethical, community-based AI projects she thinks should be replacing top-down big tech products, and many of them are strangely underwhelming. They include an app called Mumkin designed to facilitate difficult conversations about female genital mutilation (FGM) in India, and Kuini, an AI chatbot built to help Māori women quit smoking. In both instances I found myself wondering what value AI brings to these endeavours – particularly given all that Drage has discussed about its environmental impact and exploitative supply chains. Is an app more effective than training community members to act as counsellors, or funding support groups and peer support workers?

Drage describes a toolkit she co-designed to help AI companies act ethically and comply with EU regulations as a “cornerstone of utopianism”, because it shifts the focus on to how AI is built and made. In her view, utopia is not a destination but the “process of working together to develop a fairer world”. Maybe it would be unfair to expect too specific a utopian vision, but I’d nonetheless be interested to know how AI, specifically, can help us build a better future. She does not mention the things that many of AI’s biggest critics nonetheless welcome, such as its potential to improve drug discovery and disease detection. What if we got AI right, this book asks. After reading it, I can’t say I really know.

Good old apocalypse: it’s always there when we need it, ready to give shape to our baggy existential crises. As the critic Frank Kermode once wrote, the end times are a “concord-fiction,” an event that conveniently straddles an “imaginatively recorded past and imaginatively predicted future, achieved on behalf of us, who remain ‘in the middest.’ ” Indeed, as our particular middest has grown more urgently chaotic, pop culture has been swamped with post-apocalyptic content. In books (“The Three-Body Problem”), video games (The Last of Us), television (“The Last of Us” and “3 Body Problem”), and movies (“Civil War”), we repeatedly imagine how to survive a world brought to a sudden halt by aliens or ecological disaster, zombies or political collapse. Such events are useful because they are revelatory: they break open the order of things and show us what’s inside.

But what if the apocalypse unfolds without revelation, like our ordinary lives, “in the middest”? Téa Obreht’s third novel, “The Morningside,” considers this possibility. It is not a post-apocalyptic novel but an undramatically mid-apocalyptic one, in which we find our narrator, an eleven-year-old refugee named Silvia, newly arrived in Island City, a stand-in for Manhattan. Sil and her mother come from an unnamed Balkan country, referred to only as Back Home, that has suffered a climate catastrophe and its attendant humanitarian crises. Island City is not much better off: tide-swamped and largely abandoned, its few inhabitants are largely “refuge seekers,” like Sil and her mom, who have been “recruited from abroad by the federal Repopulation Program.” Living alongside them are “the stalwart handful of locals hanging on in their shrinking neighborhoods, convinced that once the right person was voted into the mayor’s office and the tide pumps got working again, things would at least go back to the way they had always been.”

The city Sil finds herself in is a waterlogged husk of its former self, with whole neighborhoods rendered unlivable by rising sea levels, though some are traversable when the tide is low enough. Despite these conditions, Island City “had always come back. It couldn’t help itself, revived by the fire it kept managing to stoke in its most recent newcomers.” Some of that fire still glows in the Morningside, the decrepit, historic luxury apartment building where Sil and her mother join her great-aunt, Ena, who is the super there. Other tenants include a teen-age ghost (according to Ena) and a relentlessly difficult Board of Occupants, whose “defects of character sprang . . . from a fatal combination of wealth and age. They weren’t about to let a few hurricanes and a submerged industrial district stand between them and the prosperity their grandparents had so doggedly eked out.”

The most fascinating tenant is Bezi Duras, a reclusive painter, also from Back Home, who occupies the building’s opulent penthouse with her three enormous dogs. Sil becomes enthralled by Bezi, and keeps surreptitious tabs on the artist and her hounds as they depart every evening for mysterious walks. These walks become an obsession—an obsession fostered by Ena, who introduces Sil to a realm she had previously never known, a realm of family history and folk tale that her mother refuses to engage with. Through her aunt’s stories, Sil begins to believe in “a world underneath the world,” where Slavic creatures of myth, like the Vila, a demanding mountain spirit, walk among us, making fateful deals with mortals. Sil’s fixation on Bezi is further egged on by Mila, another young girl from Back Home, who dares Sil to follow Bezi into the abandoned city. There they stumble into an eerie scene that could be equally at home in a novel about urban decay or a book of haunting folk tales, where crones offer darkly enchanted gifts and feral children turn into sad-eyed dogs.

This fairy-tale register is just one of many modes of storytelling that seep into “The Morningside.” The book’s grimly familiar vision of the environmentally devastated near future places it alongside recent “cli-fi” by Claire Vaye Watkins and Lydia Millet. There’s a slightly choral quality to the text; in calls made by nostalgic listeners into a pirate radio station, the Drowned City Dispatch, we get hints of how others in this world might be telling stories of its slow death. There are also hints of other books it might have been: what we eventually learn about Bezi’s twilight missions unmasks a tale of government corruption and broken political promises, to no avail. Yet Obreht’s book remains focussed through the young eyes of Sil—and thus fixated, as many children would be, on the thrillingly dark magic that suffuses her city, rather than on the science or politics of environmental catastrophe. The narrative has the mysterious, intoxicating pull of classic children’s books like “From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.” Sil’s story is an adventure that is at times so captivating that we can briefly forget that it’s an elegy.

But an elegy for what, exactly? For a lost sense of security; for a time where there could be “a year that was safer or calmer than the one before it.” The world of “The Morningside” is winding down, its hopeless efforts at renewal meant “not to build the city back up—but to hold the edges while it finishes falling.” Eventually, Sil’s mother opens the door to the past, telling her daughter what it was like Back Home before everything started to fall apart: “I wanted that for you—that life I had. . . . I realized that I’d brought you into life at a time when everyone else’s debts had come due. Only, the debtors weren’t around anymore to pay up. So it’d be you doing the paying.” Obreht doesn’t say exactly what those debts are—instead, she lets the diminished world of the novel, like the future our younger generations will face, speak for itself. It seems darkly appropriate that she wrote this novel while pregnant during the pandemic.

This vagueness perhaps suits the future better than the past. Obreht’s début novel, “The Tiger’s Wife,” wove together tales of mourning and enchantment in a fictionalized version of the Balkans in the mid-twentieth century. Her enthralling second novel, “Inland,” played with the figures and tropes of the outlaw American West. In both cases, the exuberant myth-making of her plots took precedence over the specifics of history, threatening to make the actual past feel abstract, further away than it really is. “The Morningside” seems to take place in the same semi-fictional universe as “The Tiger’s Wife”; Sil and her mother come from the city of Sarobor, which we last saw, in “The Tiger’s Wife,” on the eve of a siege during the Bosnian War. But where flights of invention made “The Tiger’s Wife” tilt toward allegory, the textures of “The Morningside”—a familiar city, a familiar crisis, a familiar complacency—make this future feel closer, shot through with an almost excruciating intimacy. Here, storytelling is not a way of relating to a mythical past but of growing up in the long middest, when the idea of home and the promise of safety are harder and harder to hold on to every day. ♦

In a future of world-devastating smog—not to mention fires, xenophobia, pandemics, and famine—an unnamed chef struggles to build a restaurant career. Forced to work with government-issued mung bean flour and deprived of produce, she quits her job in frustration, taking instead a position as a private chef for an elite research community. High on a mountain—in one of the last places where the sun still shines and things like radicchio are readily available—she gradually uncovers her employer’s plot to reimagine the world. She also falls in love with her employer’s daughter, has a lot of good sex, and a lot of good food.

On their own, the sex scenes in C Pam Zhang’s second novel, Land of Milk and Honey, are fun. Refreshing in their refusal to capitulate to writing workshop norms of spare syntax and elegant allusion. Unafraid of excess. “Yes to oysters swollen through butter,” the narrator relates. “Yes to thighs cooled on glass, my hand a hot knife between. Yes to prosciutto, its salt slick … Yes to the fatthicksweet of it, to cream, to froth that rises, to the crunched lace of the ear and the tender behind the knee.” The narrator and her lover, Aida, spend the middle portion of the novel in a haze of pleasure. “Like chimps like finches like gilas we glutted on plums … I cut a sturgeon nose to slit and ransacked its body for that other fruit, pure caviar. I looked to Aida for the salt.”

But what makes this novel surprising in its sensuousness is less the quick slide from pâté en croute to cunnilingus and more the fact that these doubled pleasures take place against the backdrop of climate crisis. Because of the bleak details of life for most people off the mountain, the narrator’s pleasure is all the more consuming.

It is also all the more provoking. Zhang is noncommittal on her novel’s genre: “I’m really curious about how this book is going to be read,” she told Elle in an interview. “I love hearing different interpretations about whether people call it ‘dystopia’ or ‘utopia’ or ‘climate fiction’ or straight ‘science fiction.’” But rather than focusing on questions of genre, reviews of Zhang’s book have focused on its indulgent sensory details. Land of Milk and Honey is, for the Times Literary Supplement, “the most sensuous novel of the year.” It has been described as “luscious” (Kirkus), “seductive” (Publisher’s Weekly), “sumptuous” (Booklist), and “decadent” (San Francisco Chronicle). “To read this book,” as one review memorably puts it, “is to know yourself as a being made of skin” (Bookpage). If this reads as the overblown praise of the book jacket, it is in part because of the missing generic context. Yes, this conjunction of food and desire—especially queer desire—has a long literary history. Yes, Milk and Honey might be put in the same loose category as other recent entries into the sexy eating subgenre.

But climate fiction—and, given Milk and Honey’s eco-apocalyptic setting, it surely is that—has a vexed relationship with pleasure. On the one hand, the genre is premised on the fact that reading can be a pleasurable act. Climatologist Judith Curry, for instance, claimed that fiction could be an “untapped way of …. smuggling some serious topics into the consciousness of readers who may not be following the science.” Fiction, here, is framed as the sugar that makes the medicine go down, a device “geared to useless pleasure but necessary in a time when ‘serious topics’ need their audience.”

Despite Curry’s hopes, however, pleasure—for both readers and characters—is often surprisingly absent from climate narratives. Instead, climate fiction describes bad feelings (fear, anxiety, loss), and it produces bad feelings. Climate anxiety novels like Jenny Offill’s Weather and Madeleine Watts’s Inland Sea—argues Rithika Ramamurthy—trap the reader within “an emotional atmosphere where the endless fact of cosmic hardship looms over the insignificance of personal life.”

Seeking to prove this point empirically, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to solicit accounts of reading experiences from 161 readers of climate fiction. “In response to a specific question on affect,” he writes, “‘how did this book make you feel?’ only 26% of the responses could be remotely qualified as positive. Negative emotions were often intense, immediate, and self-directed.” “Though these responses clearly reflect engaging storytelling,” Schneider-Mayerson concludes, “it is worth questioning whether they make for effective environmental persuasion.”

To consider the relations of power and care and sacrifice that go into any good meal or any good tryst. But the crisis’s smooth resolution belies that commitment to nuance.

Even here, in the realm of emotion, the discursive context of climate fiction renders action the primary rubric for success. As Heather Houser asks in a set of questions that typify ecocriticism’s orientation toward feeling, “How might emotions make us pay attention to our … environmentally precarious present? How might they ferry us from awareness to an obligation to respond?”

Emotions, in other words, are worth attending to in part because of their power to make us pay attention and to remind us of our “obligation” to take action. Insofar as positive emotions—especially bodily pleasure—get coded as distractions, they seem an improbable tool for this kind of call to arms. Pleasures are for languorous forgetting and fleeting escapism. They are not the stuff of duty and responsibility.

In recent years, however, scholars have begun to resist these frameworks of obligation, in favor of rearticulating pleasure as a crucial part of sustainable activism. “Pleasure activism is the work we do to reclaim our whole, happy, and satisfiable selves from the impacts, delusions, and limitations of oppression and/or supremacy,” explains adrienne maree brown, whose Pleasure Activism is perhaps the most prominent contemporary example of this new resistance to discourses of guilt and duty. “Pleasure activism asserts that we all need and deserve pleasure, and that our social structures must reflect this.” Milk and Honey is an exciting entry into the climate fiction corpus because it echoes this trend. The novel jettisons the generic tropes of the “info dump” and the guilt trip, and replaces them instead with the notion that there might be things worth working for.

Thinking more specifically in the climate sphere, Kate Soper’s “alternative hedonism” makes a similar move away from guilt: emphasizing instead the possible satisfactions of walking instead of driving, or the robust flavors of farmer’s market produce. Similarly, Jiaying Zhao and Elizabeth Dunn’s “Happy Climate Project” emphasizes the ways that limiting one’s carbon footprint might yield a greater sense of “time affluence” and less cognitive dissonance. These latter projects sound fairly chaste compared to brown’s orgasmic injunctions. But even so, they represent something of a departure from the scared-straight tactics of some earlier climate messaging.

Zhang’s novel, for all it concedes the satisfactions of previously extinct mammoth meat and MDMA, ends up surprisingly aligned with Soper’s more limited gratification. “Part of the intellectual work in the novel,” Zhang says, “—and part of the work of the chef as she lives on this mountain—is to find her own definitions of pleasure, to realize that she finds it often in simple things like a strawberry, or even processed food, and that there is some kind of moral center to her pleasure.”

Some of this moral center emerges through contrast. The narrator—and the novel—find the mountain retreat’s purpose “decadent, gluttonous. Selfish.” The vast resources of the mountain go to projects like returning golden chimps from extinction, setting them as bait for a hunting party of wealthy potential donors, and then roasting the fresh kills over an open flame. When it comes time to dine, “staff members have removed the heads but still the comparison to a human body, a small human body, say the body of a child, is undeniable.” The primary donor cracks a shin from a thigh, “whirls a forearm above his head like a boy with a fairground prize. They promised the rarest meat on earth. Fuck me if this isn’t cooked to perfection.” It is not hard, when the mountain’s inevitable downfall comes, to cheer alongside all those left off the guest list.

That downfall, in a perverse turn of fate, ends up saving the world. As Milk and Honey is narrated postfactually, I can say without spoiling things that the novel’s environmental crisis is ultimately resolved. It is resolved, however, not through pleasure or activism, but through the magic of venture capital. The very public failure of the mountain project meant investors looked for a more “diversified, time tested solution.” “The language of business moved businessmen,” Zhang writes, and “private funding poured into research on air purification and crop development.” Funded by 80 million euros from investors, a lab in Berkeley discovers a dandelion that can nullify smog particles by binding them with simple sugars. Cloud seeding technology increases rainfall, the narrator opens a successful Italian Chinese fusion restaurant in Paris, and the United States opens its borders and apologizes for the agricultural tests that contributed to the smog in the first place.

In this quick resolution, some of the provocation of the preceding pages recedes. The narrator is skeptical of the way the rhetoric changes in the wake of the dandelion discovery, criticizing both the lionization of the investors and the quick shift from dazed gratitude to smug triumph. But her skepticism doesn’t change the fact that the world’s future pleasures are chalked up to the success of private funding. The novel’s bad billionaires are replaced with good ones, the gluttonous technological developments replaced with the virtuous.

What does it mean that a rare work of pleasure-driven climate fiction is so fully reliant on techno-optimism? That the existing structures of science and capital get to save the day, even after so many luxurious sentences, so much profitless sex?

The message of the novel’s first 200 pages was to take pleasure—in all its emotional and ethical complexity—seriously. To consider the relations of power and care and sacrifice that go into any good meal or any good tryst. But the crisis’s smooth resolution belies that commitment to nuance.

“I’ve sampled this world in the years I was given,” the narrator offers by way of closing. She knows, “at the end, what was sweetest. The spice of loam. The sting of salt and sedge. The tongue, dumb beast, believes.”

The narrator is left satisfied by remembered pleasures. The reader, wanting.