Speculative fiction

James Bradley has been one of our country’s most outspoken and prolific commentators on the climate crisis, and his warnings about the environmental devastation that is already locked into the future have started to bite in ways that can no longer be ignored. Now, with coronavirus so quickly following the bushfires, we recognise even more clearly the state of constant, underlying dread portrayed in this novel, with its ‘sense of hastening, a dislocation deep in the fabric of things’.

Climate change, migration, activism, terrorism: for people living in a small country at the bottom of the world, what does hope for the future look like in the teeth of that gale?

Both Schalk and Rusert forge conversations between fields that are rarely in explicit communication.

þu eart endelaf    usses cynnes,Wægmundinga.    Ealle wyrd forsweopmine magas    to metodsceafte,eorlas on elne;    ic him æfter sceal. (‘Thou art the…

Scarcely a week now goes by without a new fiction on the theme of climate change. Such works have been termed cli-fi, a truly appalling neologism. To write a full survey of the field is outside the scope of a single essay. Indeed, even to consider in depth the recent Australian examples alone, such as James Bradley’s 2015 Clade, or Jane Rawson’s 2013 A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists, this essay would need to be book-length. Rather I want to concentrate on The Sea and Summer and Turner himself, for the two are inextricable: the man grounded his writing in his life, even when depicting the future.

Two new works of Australian speculative fiction were on my mind when 2016 was declared the hottest year on record,…

My research and reading confirmed what I’d suspected all along: most interesting texts don’t fall into easy categories. That’s why I wanted to turn my attention to Katz, a writer who understands the art of storytelling and revels in the expressive possibilities of language …

In The Buried Giant, a fog of forgetfulness has engulfed the people of Britain so that the characters are struggling to understand their fears and the moral logic of their world. They have no past, and the novel reaches for the connections that may create a narrative, both public and personal, for them.

The first scene in Clade is in Antarctica. It is the summer solstice, ‘the first intimation of the year’s long retreat into the dark’. Adam is a scientist and, in particular, a climate-change researcher. The urgency of this activity is underscored, not for the last time, in a novel that will let us consume our fill of human-assisted natural catastrophes …