Sad Planets

In this erudite and expansive investigation, media studies scholars Pettman (Infinite Distraction) and Thacker (Infinite Resignation) draw on literary and scientific sources from antiquity to the present to explore how humanity can grieve for something as “ambient yet palpable, diffuse yet tangible” as the climate. These dozens of essays flow from one into another with melancholy momentum, drifting from a rumination on Friedrich Nietzsche’s notion of humanity as “the weeping animal,” privileged yet alienated in its anthropocentrism; to a eulogy for Laika, the first dog in space; to an examination of the “saturnine mood” that touches on Elizabethan playwright Robert Greene’s Planetomachia and W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn. Throughout, the book closely resembles Robert Burton’s famed 17th-century treatise The Anatomy of Melancholy, which the authors astutely point out is itself an index of “turbulent changes” that emerged from mankind’s shifting relationship with the planet, as the era’s scientific advancements and globe-spanning empires produced a sense of human “dominion over the Earth.” Later chapters are punctuated by reports of recent extreme weather phenomena, pulling the reader out of dreamy contemplation and back into the urgency of the present. Strangely beautiful and bracingly bleak, this successfully renders what could have been a perverse intellectual exercise into a work of genuine feeling. (June)