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Dry Land, B Pladek, 2023 novel. I've recced some of Pladek's short fiction: the outstanding All Us Ghosts (one of my favorite stories from 2021), The Salt Price, last year's Spring Woods Spring. This year's The Spindle of Necessity is a very meta piece about fiction and identity and authenticity.
Dry Land is his first novel, historical fantasy about a queer forester during WWI who discovers he has a power to make plants grow. It's a slow, thoughtful book that repeatedly turns away from a simpler story and says "maybe more complicated than that". It's about self-illusion and self-acceptance, Muir's preservationism vs Forestry Service timber management, the construction of ideas of "wilderness" and "naturalness" and how those ideas sit awkwardly on real landscapes, what-ifs about super powers and how they might be received and used, human connection, the grounding power of observation and contact with living things. ("Touching grass", as the internet says.) It's a profoundly Le Guin-ian novel both in its Daoism, its critique of action, effort, and resistance and corresponding celebration of quietness and endurance, and in its appreciation of the small vs the large, the everyday, the moments between. He writes here in a 2016 essay about the image of the Dry Land in Earthsea and how that connects to Dante and Rilke; the central problem in Pladek's novel (whether the "shortcut" of the power is necessarily sterilizing and ultimately futile) is directly related to the "cheating" desire for immortality in Earthsea. Or if you want a living/current comp, Rebecca Campbell's Arboreality, for similar specificity of landscape and concern with how to live in it.
Here's one more short story: What the Marsh Remembers is an earlier take on a similar concept and themes as Dry Land. They are the same in the way that Mary Brown's When Pigs Fly is the same as Unlikely Ones - Pladek's thoughts about the whole business clearly evolved a lot as he thought more about what he wanted to say - so if you do think you want to read Dry Land, I would recommend not reading this story until afterwards, so you can look back and see the seed of it.
Dry Land is his first novel, historical fantasy about a queer forester during WWI who discovers he has a power to make plants grow. It's a slow, thoughtful book that repeatedly turns away from a simpler story and says "maybe more complicated than that". It's about self-illusion and self-acceptance, Muir's preservationism vs Forestry Service timber management, the construction of ideas of "wilderness" and "naturalness" and how those ideas sit awkwardly on real landscapes, what-ifs about super powers and how they might be received and used, human connection, the grounding power of observation and contact with living things. ("Touching grass", as the internet says.) It's a profoundly Le Guin-ian novel both in its Daoism, its critique of action, effort, and resistance and corresponding celebration of quietness and endurance, and in its appreciation of the small vs the large, the everyday, the moments between. He writes here in a 2016 essay about the image of the Dry Land in Earthsea and how that connects to Dante and Rilke; the central problem in Pladek's novel (whether the "shortcut" of the power is necessarily sterilizing and ultimately futile) is directly related to the "cheating" desire for immortality in Earthsea. Or if you want a living/current comp, Rebecca Campbell's Arboreality, for similar specificity of landscape and concern with how to live in it.
Here's one more short story: What the Marsh Remembers is an earlier take on a similar concept and themes as Dry Land. They are the same in the way that Mary Brown's When Pigs Fly is the same as Unlikely Ones - Pladek's thoughts about the whole business clearly evolved a lot as he thought more about what he wanted to say - so if you do think you want to read Dry Land, I would recommend not reading this story until afterwards, so you can look back and see the seed of it.
