Accelerated Growth Environment is the newest SF climate fiction novella from Lauren C. Teffeau.
Accelerated Growth Environment is the story of Dr. Jorna Benton. In a near- to mid-future, she is the principal scientist aboard the Climasphere, a mobile ecosphere that grows a variety of plants from different biomes. Its goal is to be a mobile nursery and a special, rapid growth environment, for plants being developed to try and help restore biomes all over the Earth. From the arctic to the desert, there is a wide variety of plants that are being developed and made ready for transplant into the world, all around the world. It’s a big job with a big responsibility. But when things start happening to Jorna’s work, her slowly-revealed past appears to be catching up with her.
Accelerated Growth Environment, a novella by Lauren C. Teffeau, tells the story.
Teffeau’s novella fits into a mold of climate-oriented science fiction (or “Cli-fi” as some have called it) and I want to focus on that as my framework for engaging with the novella. This is not the first time that Teffeau has engaged with climate and climate change in her work. A Hunger with No Name pits a technological society whose technology is altering the local environment to the detriment of all against those who would be devastated by such technology. It’s a strong story of the dangers of using technology unthinkingly. Implanted is a cyberpunk novel with a dystopic climate-gone-to-hell near future, but the focus in that story is cyberpunk more than the climate change. But while the previous stories did touch on climate change and climate fiction, Automated Growth Environment is a full deep dive into the sub-subgenre.
According to our friends at Wikipedia, Cli-fi is literature that deals with climate change. Generally speculative in nature but inspired by climate science, works of climate fiction may take place in the world as we know it, in the near to further future, or in fictional worlds experiencing climate change. The genre frequently includes science fiction and dystopian or utopian themes, imagining potential futures based on research about the impacts of climate change and speculations about how humans may respond to these and the problem of climate change. Climate fiction typically involves the fallout of anthropogenic climate change and other environmental issues as opposed to weather and disaster more generally. Technologies such as climate engineering or climate adaptation practices often feature prominently in works exploring their impacts on society.
Wikipedia then goes on to cite Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future (2020) as a seminal book in establishing the sub-sub genre, but I do recall agents and promoters of Cli-fi trying to sell me on the idea of it in the 2010s. There was a constant surge of people selling me the subgenre as the future of science fiction, since I had read and reviewed some stories that fit the mold.
So how does Accelerated Growth Environment fit into Cli-fi, then? It certainly takes place in a short- to medium-term future where severe Climate change has occurred. The whole point of the Climasphere project is to develop and distribute plants that can better tolerate the changed environments and biomes of this climate change ravaged Earth. Plants like drought-tolerant strains of cotton,corn, soybeans, and rice are being grown in the sphere. Trees that can help mitigate coastal erosion are being developed and grown for transplant. It’s a long-term commitment and project and we see Benton rising to the challenge of various crises, including having to adjust strains and react to the results of their transplants.
The actual ravages to the earth by climate change are relatively underdescribed in the novella. There is a strain of Cli-fi that almost wallows in depicting how bad the Earth or an environment or area within Earth can become. This novella describes an incident on Benton’s youth but rather focuses on what the Climasphere can do to help the world. In this way, unlike the aforementioned gloomy areas of Cli-fi, this novella is an incredibly optimistic work, believing that positive adaptation and improvement in the midst of climate change is not only worth attempting, but that it can in fact, succeed.
So speaking on that some more. There is a sub-sub-genre of Science fiction called Hopepunk or sometimes Solarpunk that is all about science fiction futures where sustainability, building back and fighting against the damage caused by climate change and other ecological devastation to the Earth. This subgenre is, like Cli-fi, still trying to find its way and stake a place in the science fiction pie. Works like A Half-Built Garden (Ruthanna Emrys), Gamechanger by L.X. Beckett, The Eco collections edited by Marissa Van Uden, and now this novella, Accelerated Growth Environment, explore a Hopepunk/Solarpunk approach to Cli-fi.
As an editorial note, this novella has come out in a time where American investment in science, technology, climate and green initiatives are being hollowed out, destroyed and devalued. It was thus very endearing that the Climasphere in the novel is launched from Philadelphia, suggesting that the current trajectory of U.S, policy and ethos is aberrant and not permanent in the future of the novel.
Beyond the Cli-fi aspects, Teffeau brings a delicate queer exploration of a workplace relationship (and possibly a romance, or at least a lusting after) on the part of the main character, Dr. Benton, and her commander, Kaysar. Given the thorny problems of such a relationship, this would-be liaison is treated on both sides very carefully and very aware of the potential ethical problems.
The other thing that Teffeau treats with care is something thornier still: fundamentalist religion. It turns out that fundamentalists who believe that the project of Climasphere is against God’s plan, and thus the work that they do must be opposed and stopped. Teffeau treats this with additional respect as we find out in the course of the novel that Benton herself has old ties to a fundamentalist community. This not only provides an obvious source of drama and tension and a sudden distrust in her as this becomes apparent, but this also gives a human face to such beliefs, and the costs and travails of deprogramming from a destructive and malevolent cult.
In addition, Teffeau’s cyberpunk bona-fides get a workout here, too. In addition to the whole Climasphere project as an example of high technology (and as the plot unfolds, how the opposition can use and misuse that technology), Teffeau offers up an artificial intelligence, Savvy, in the form of a mobile artificial intelligence, who helps manage her flow of information and her schedule and her life. Savvy is in effect, a robot sidekick for Jorna that has a personality and characterization that vividly makes them a character. Although the novella sticks to Jorna’s point of view throughout, Savvy is one of the more well drawn characters in the novella.
Together, all this makes the novella excellently grounded and focused on its characters, their problems and travails as being a central focus of the story. Teffeau goes to great pains to make her characters relatable and invites us to invest in them as the story unfolds. And overall, Accelerated Growth Environment provides a well paced and intriguing character-focused novella that firmly fulfills its Cli-fi bonafides in the Hopepunk/Solarpunk mode.
