Elvia Wilk

In the near future, Berlin’s real estate is being flipped in the name of “sustainability,” only to make the city even more unaffordable; artists are employed by corporations as consultants; and the weather is acting strange. In search of affordable housing, young couple Anja and Louis move into a community on an artificial mountain, The Berg—yet another “eco-friendly” initiative run by a corporation called Finster. They’re offered a home rent-free in exchange for keeping quiet about the seriously malfunctioning infrastructure of the experimental house.But when Louis returns home from his mother’s funeral in America, Anja is convinced he has changed. He seems to be in denial of his grief and newly idealistic, consumed by a secret project at the NGO where he works as an artist-consultant. Anja is horrified when she discovers what Louis has invented: a pill called Oval that temporarily rewires the user’s brain to be more generous. Louis is convinced that if he can introduce the drug into the Berlin club scene, he can finally remedy the income disparity that has made Berlin so unlivable.Oval is a fascinating portrait of the unbalanced relationships that shape our world, as well as a prescient warning of what the future may hold.

From the author of Oval, a collection of “fan nonfiction” that proposes new possibilities and genealogies for weird fiction in the age of extinction. This collection is about love, death, plants, and weird fiction. It takes its title from a Margaret Atwood story in which an adolescent girl seems to turn into a tree. It examines works by Doris Lessing, Jenny Hval, Anne Carson, Octavia Butler, Michelle Tea, Helen Phillips, Mark Fisher, Donna Haraway, and Jeff and Ann VanderMeer; it explores the erotics of compost, vampire-themed live-action roleplaying, intoxicated birds, medieval nuns, invasive spores, and solarpunk. The book asks: what kind of stories are being written that help us rethink our human-centric perspective of Earth? What kinds of narratives will make sense of the age of extinction? Death by Landscape creates a syllabus for feminist sci-fi and speculative fiction for our time.