“Man versus nature, and the ability of humans to cope under environmental stress, are Stewart’s two obsessions. He is at once a chronicler of the achievements and architectures of modern civilization and an ecological fatalist.”
—Christine Smallwood, The Nation
FIRE
George R. Stewart
Introduction by Emma Rothschild
Among the earliest works of ecofiction, George R. Stewart’s Fire narrates the ecological upheaval of a wildfire in the Sierra Nevada foothills with extraordinary depth and intimacy. Now, nearly eighty years after its original publication—our understanding of man-made climate change as clear and grim as ever, and with wildfire smoke clouding Northeastern skies this week—Fire returns with great urgency, a revelatory and relevant piece of fiction for today’s readers.
The novel chronicles the eleven-day lifespan of the wildfire, dubbed Spitcat, from its modest, smoldering birth, to its maturation into an inferno, to its eventual defeat and demise. Resembling the concise style of a logbook, Stewart’s narration jumps between perspectives and situations, each brief entry focusing on a different character in the book’s forestland cast: a novice fire lookout, a meteorologist, the trees and plants and animals imperiled by the blaze, and of course, the volatile personality that is Spitcat itself. On its itinerant, eleven-day course, Fire touches on every kind of life—human or otherwise—changed and thrown into chaos by nature’s destructive and transformative power.
Fire was the August selection of the NYRB Classics Book Club.
