Short Change

Can a short story dramatize the effects of a warming planet better than a novel? With Planet Earth, Nicholas Ruddock makes a strong case that it can. Across eighteen stories, the writer and physician from Guelph, Ontario, considers the interplay between the important junctures in a person’s life and the history of ecological destruction.

This animating friction is on full display in “Marriage Story.” The narrator and his wife are both candidates for a selective space program. When they are passed over by their institute’s enigmatic director, the husband realizes that they have been chosen instead for an unexceptional existence:

The couple are assigned to the tedium of domestic life while their colleagues head off for interstellar dramas. Some might read this first-class entry as emblematic of the short story form itself, which often grapples with minutiae and “small disasters.” Many of Ruddock’s plot lines show little desire to move beyond the mundane; they are firmly rooted in earthly places and, barring one or two magical flourishes, in realism. Contrary to the purposeful awkwardness of “jigsawed,” Planet Earth successfully marries the “humdrum essence” of the everyday and a kaleidoscopic vision of “this dying planet.”

Readers expecting a sustained emphasis on climate change, however, may be disappointed. For much of the book, any sense of widespread catastrophe appears as subtext. “Wolverine” follows revolutionaries turned food couriers who take violent revenge on abusive customers; in “First Girlfriend,” a chance encounter between future lovers disrupts a family argument; and “The Phosphorescence” finds two Canadian backpackers doing daredevil stunts in the French Riviera. Ruddock’s primary focus is on distinctly human problems and the culture built around them. When plants and animals do appear, they are often sequestered as metaphors. In “Dupont Street,” for instance, an attic full of noisy bats is a way into a family’s memories. Elsewhere, a museum exhibit filled with thousands of glass flowers gives way to scenes from wartime Germany, when “incendiary bombs fell” and “the ash of Dresden bone mixed with the sandy loam and blew hot with the blast-furnace heat of revenge.” Leaving ecological concerns in the margins does not detract from high-quality storytelling. Unlike some of the more sprawling entries, “Esther” shakes up the trope of the lecherous priest with tact. As the parents of a clergyman’s victim move from unsuspecting to vengeful, their fleeting observations and assumptions speak volumes. “Surely our imaginations were running amok around us,” Esther’s father remembers. “How Othello-like to imagine ill of a man of God.”

Ruddock eventually turns in earnest to environmental ruin. Toward the end of the collection, his run‑on sentences morph into extended litanies that are both taxonomic and unruly. The most challenging example of these, “Knight Errant,” consists of disjointed thoughts and lists within lists. Ostensibly describing a film shoot, an actor recounts a “montage” of image fragments from recreations of various wars. The final story, “Meltdown,” leaves readers with a pileup of catastrophes: “clear-cuts, methane, reckless winds, floods, tornados, rising sea, starvation, COVID, migration, meltdown.” Ruddock asks the reader to make rapid-fire connections across dense webs of social, emotional, and global disasters. In doing so, he demonstrates the singular potential of the short story to capture both intimate individual concerns and an anxious collective consciousness.

Ruddock is at his best when fusing attention to everyday details with a geological sensibility. However short, two pieces of flash fiction are expansive explorations of afterlife. “George Mallory” considers the mountaineer who perished on Mount Everest in 1924, and “Transformation” imagines the preserved body of the seventeenth-century navigator Henry Hudson, who disappeared in the Far North.

“Genetic Memory” is the real highlight. It begins with an itinerant couple moving from Ontario to Yukon, where they naively set up camp next to Clinton Creek’s asbestos mine. “Rogue fibres hitched rides on inspired air,” the narrator says, imagining the poisonous particles “tricking the genome.” He muses on inherited knowledge and how it is heeded or neglected. In seven pages, Ruddock experiments with unlikely associations between the natural and the artificial, the physiological and the psychological, the local and the global. “Floorboards creaking, slow-dancing” in a Toronto apartment expands outward to “our species’ dire concerns, the moratorium on cod, draggers, clear-cuts, sewage, whatever else we have done to North America.” In this way, “Genetic Memory” is Planet Earth in miniature. Throughout, Ruddock succeeds in scaling his narrative frames seamlessly, locating the fragile individual amid ongoing planetary collapse.