This new instalment focuses on narratives that dramatise our deepest concerns about a vengeful ecosystem. The British Library’s splendid Tales of the Weird range draws together often neglected stories from the past century and a half, and has already given us themed anthologies on subjects as diverse as Christmas, train travel and mad science. Suspicion of nature, allied to a multiplicity of related fears, has long been embedded in our culture. As activists line the streets to threaten sabotage, as a child preaches to politicians about the com ing catastrophe, as we note shifts in weather patterns and murmur nervous platitudes about the persistence of rain at this time of year, there is a feeling of dread, the awful suspicion that we have left it all too late and that the environment means, quite soon now, to have its revenge. W e live at the present time in mortal fear of the natural world.
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