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"As in a furnace which reflects heat from all sides, the temperature leaped up. Even the mice in the rock-crevices shrivelled, as the heat seared their lungs and sucked the oxygen from the air. In the intensity of white light the skeletons of the azaleas stood out luminously for a moment, and then collapsed into ashes. Hot scales of rock mingling with the ashes of the moss slid down, and sizzle in the pool. Even the water grew luke-warm, and the very trout sought the rock crannies at the bottom."

This was the "Tenth Day," in George R Stewart's captivating novel Fire, first published in 1948, and republished in 2024. Fire is the story of an imagined wild-fire, the Spitcat Fire in California, and it is a collective biography of the fire-watchers and foresters, the parachute jumpers and meteorologists, who succeed in managing the fire, and also of the bears and rabbits, the mice and pine-squirrels and ants, whose lives were destroyed in the "flaming disaster of those few days [which] would not be undone in a hundred years;" "remember the smell of smoke in the morning, and the copper sun at noon, and the crimson glare at evening, not of sunset."

The imagined Spitcat Fire of 1948 devastated 10,032 acres. In early 2024 -- in the real world of climate change and rising temperatures --  1,058,452 acres were devastated in the Smokehouse Creek fire in the Texas Panhandle. The Dixie fire that started in California in July 2021 -- in much the same location, north-east of Sacramento, as the imagined Ponderosa forest in Fire -- affected 963,309 acres. The Australian wildfire of 2019-2020 extended across a "fire impact area" of 28 million acres, and was estimated to have "killed or displaced.... nearly three billion animals." These were the vertebrates alone; within the forests and woodlands that burned, there were 143 million mammals, 2.46 billion reptiles, 180 million birds, and 51 million frogs.

The smell of smoke in the morning is part of ordinary life, far to the east of California, and far to the south of the Canadian fires that burned in 2023 over 45 million acres. So is the particulate matter that has affected air quality from Siberia to Indonesia.

Fire is an optimistic book, in the end. It is an evocation of hope and ingenuity. But it is also a work of realism, an ecological novel that unfolds in the interior of a flaming disaster. It is a book for our times, and for a burning earth.

Emma Rothschild
August 2024