‘On time and water’ by Andri Snær Magnason

Andri Snær Magnason is an Icelandic writer, activist and documentary filmmaker winner of the Green Earth Book Awards Honor Book and of a Phillip K. Dick Special Citation for his sci-fi novel LoveStar. His last book ‘On Time and Water’ is being published in twenty-two languages over 2020–21 and is regarded as a particular case: part biographic, part scientific, part mythological, it narrates environmental scientific data through the filter of Icelandic cultural heritage in order to help us understand the scale of the current, rather dramatic, climatic changes. We probably need a new narrative approach if we are to be struck by the environmental changes, because it seems that everything happens without barely anyone noticing it. Could Magnason’s book be the answer? It surely works fine, for the reader. It is a very interesting and stimulating book, full of information regarding Iceland, over time and space, so to speak. Magnason’s language strikes sublime sentences thus conveying concepts that would remain unheard otherwise, while he also brings these scientific concepts down (or up?) to a personal level, because this is what we need nowadays in order to ‘see’ and ‘hear’ images and words that were unheard before. We need emotional involvement, thus overcoming the bias that makes us all blind and deaf to the overwhelming environmental crisis currently happening.

Andri Snær Magnason’s main bibliography

‘On Time and Water’ (2020)

The story of the blue planet (2013)

The casket of time (yonder) (2019)

Lovestar (2013)

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