Over 90 percent of the bitumen mined and extracted in Alberta's Athabasca region is exported to the United States. It also accounts for nearly 20 percent of the United States’ oil import. This influx of viscous oil produces some of the highest outputs of carbon dioxide in any area of crude-oil production in the world. US President Donald Trump's recent withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement, an agreement intended to limit the global output of carbon dioxide, and his subsequent promise of regaining American control over energy industry and production, highlight how the discourses of energy sustainability, fossil-fuel dependency, and regional conservation are complicated by their inherent connection to corporate discourses of growth, prosperity, and consumption. In Unsustainable Oil: Facts, Counterfacts, and Fictions, Jon Gordon outlines ways in which Canadian fiction focussed on the bitumen sands helped produce an alternative cultural discourse to undermine the constantly competing facts of economic and political rhetoric that situate the public in a constant state of political uncertainty. In this way, Gordon highlights how fiction offers alternative ways in which to interpret our relationship with our region, and in doing so attempts to offer an understanding of the human relationship with the region that embraces its impermanence, whilst offering up space for alternative relationships centered on new forms of understanding and governance.

Structured on the basis of theme, rather than any clear distinction between modes of discourse or artistic disciplines, Gordon dedicates a chapter each to what he appears to consider distinct issues in the way we conceptualize the bitumen sands in areas such as sustainability, economic necessity, environmental impact, and energy transition. In doing this, he examines examples from nonfiction discourse such as provincial government campaign material, federal government policy statements, university press releases, and petroleum industry advertisements in a broad range of contexts. He then offers a contrast in an examination of writers such as Ruby Wiebe, Sidney Ells, Mark Prescot, Warren Cariou, and Richard Van Camp. With the exception of lobbyist Ezra Levant's Ethical Oil (2010), to which he takes particular exception, Gordon does not often reference texts across chapters. However, he does not isolate each theme as separate issues relating to Canada's relationship with oil that must be examined in isolation, but instead manages to position them as interlocking parts of a cultural narrative. This form of thematic analysis does mean that, at times, Gordon neglects to cite a particular text that may provide a useful example of a specific theme because of its inclusion in a later chapter addressing a separate theme. One particular instance worth noting is featured in chapter 3, where an examination of Marc Prescott's play Fort Mac (2009) in the context of economic justification for bitumen sands mining chooses not to make any reference to Evans and Shyna's 5000 Dead Ducks (2011) that is mentioned in chapter 6, despite the insight this text can provide us in examining the cost and relative justification of environmental change in a zoological context. To include this text, if only briefly, would possibly have benefited Gordon's argument that justification for bitumen mining relies on a narrative that reinforces the economic over the environmental status quo.

To many other scholars and students of American culture, it may at first seem tangential to feature in this journal a review preoccupied with the geographical and culture landscape of Canada's oil-producing regions. Nevertheless, Gordon's text demonstrates to us that the political ramifications of the energy extracted, governed, and consumed in the Canadian landscape are exacerbated when left unchallenged by the consideration of future alternatives. To researchers in the field of North American ecocritism or petroculture, Gordon's comparative analysis of political and economic rhetoric alongside artistic modes of resistance provides an accessible outline through which future alternative conceptions of the Canadian landscape and the human relation to its natural resource may be formed.