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How might the novelist, working with a form traditionally obsessed with humans, represent the nonhuman? Or, perhaps a better question: how might a fiction writer animate the two — figure and ground — to express and confront our present ecological crisis? Is it sustainable to work, as we do, in an intensely virtual and phenomenally heated time? The Disaster Tourist by Yun Ko-eun, translated from Korean by Lizzie Buehler, offers one possible, tantalisingly zany answer to the future of work and fiction (storytelling) in our age of mass extinction For Yona Ko, the office-worker protagonist, ‘Disaster lay dormant in every corner, like depression’ This South Korean dark comedy underlines the absurdity of our complicity and collective contribution to the present crisis    Reading the first chapter, I couldn’t help but imagine it narrated like a cheesy film trailer from the 90s, a male voiceover on top of shots of office cubicles Yona Ko is a top programming coordinator at Jungle, a Seoul-based tourism company that specialises in holidays to disaster sites Jungle offers 152 travel packages, including trips to sites of nuclear meltdowns, floods, earthquakes, volcanos, desertification, hurricanes, war, tsunamis, and much more ‘As a child she hadn’t imagined doing work like this, but she was skilled at quantifying the unquantifiable,’ the narrator notes, drily When a tsunami strikes Jinhae, a coastal city, during cherry blossom season, Yona takes the train down to survey the site, distributes donations and condolences, and plans an itinerary that combines volunteering with viewing the aftermath of the tsunami Rumours of an enormous trash island formed from wreckage and ‘destined to swirl about the sea for decades’ float onto the TV, but quickly vanish Back at the office, Yona waits by the copy machine, feeling so catatonically bored that she starts to browse websites that estimate the user’s date of death After ten years at the company, her conscience is more of a whisper than a shout: a customer calls to cancel a trip because his child is in hospital, and she explains for the thousandth