Marijus Gailius (born 1983) published his first collection of stories in 2012, but has been mostly working as a journalist, sometimes engaging with literary topics and materials, but gradually becoming one of the most prominent voices ringing the alarm bells about climate change and the responsibility of humanity in it. However, he also perceives climate-changing human activity to be part of a larger trend of reckless and cruel consumerism, something that affects not just nature, but culture and human relationships too. As a literary critic, he is opinionated, and as an essayist, he demonstrates a great eye for detail and keen observation skills. His most successful novel so far, Oro, seems to have uncovered even broader range of skills and interests – from the generic peculiarities of dystopia and intertextuality to development of language, ideology and technology. 

Oro (Air). Vilnius: Odilė, 2018, – 430 pp. 

Vincentas Šemeta, a famous climate scientist, mysteriously drowns in the sea, and his family and friends are left with his somewhat mysterious, somewhat cynical testament and prophesies about upcoming natural horrors and disasters. The first plotline involves Šemeta (who himself only appears at the opening chapters), who forces the people around him to overcome distance and estrangement in order to untangle his mysterious clues. 

Meanwhile, around one hundred years later, in the second plotline, all of Šemeta’s prophecies have come true. However, it appears that coming to terms with the drowning of Amsterdam or the decimation of London is a lot easier than overcoming the human condition and partisanship. Written in a clever projection of how the Lithuanian language could develop in the future, the second story describes the political struggles between nationalism (whose adherents can hardly speak the language which they claim to love and cherish so much) and an ideology that puts its faith in the technological progress. If that does not sound enough, the author claims to have structured the novel based on a chess game between Gary Kasparov and Deep Blue in 1996, the first chess game that a machine won against a human being. And he has interwoven a paraphrase of most of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. It seems that this complicated combination paid off: Oro was voted as Book of the Year 2019.