A few lost people

Climate fiction as future realism

Naama Grey-Smith

Children of Tomorrow

by J.R. Burgmann Upswell

$29.99 pb, 256 pp

James Burgmann-Milner (writing under the suitably sci-fi alias J.R. Burgmann) knows his cli-fi, or climate fiction. A teaching associate at the Monash Climate Change Communication Research Hub, he received his PhD for research on the representation and communication of anthropogenic climate change in literature and other popular media. He is the coauthor of Science Fiction and Climate Change: A sociological approach (2020) and has also contributed several insightful reviews of cli-fi works in ABR in recent years, including those of Ned Beauman, James Bradley, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Richard Powers.

Literary visions of climate collapse are represented in Burgmann’s début novel, Children of Tomorrow, as ‘old realisms no one heeded – Atwood, Bradley, Mitchell, Robinson’. Powers’ Pulitzer Prize–winning ecological novel The Overstory (2018) is quoted in Burgmann’s epigraph: ‘The world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.’

In response, Burgmann has set out to write precisely this – a story about a few lost people. They include tree researcher Arne Bakke, his brooding brother Freddie, itinerant diver Evie Weatherall, her Canadian cousin and entrepreneurial celebrity Wally, self-assured philosopher John, and spirited bioengineer and coder Kim. Their camaraderie reminded me of the documentary The Most Unknown (2018), where scientists of different disciplines visit one another across the globe in search of common purpose – except that here their brief includes survival.

In Children of Tomorrow, this group of friends – and their descendants – live through the accelerating devastation of anthropogenic climate change. Beginning at ‘Carbon dioxide parts per million: 402.5’ (aka the year 2016) with historic Tasmanian bushfires, this intergenerational narrative is divided into three sections – century’s beginning, middle, and end. As the decades roll on, these ‘lost people’ witness catastrophic climate events that render much of the planet uninhabitable and crumble the seemingly permanent structures of human society.

Stylistically, Burgmann leans further into the literary than Bradley or Atwood, with a meditative and poetic descriptive approach (often dubbed ‘lyrical’ in the trade) closer to that of Gail Jones or Michelle de Kretser. Burgmann’s prose seems shaped by vast and eclectic influences, and succeeds in creating a distinctive style of his own. Perhaps inspired by the language of scientific research, he often opts for Latin diction (‘the dexter side’, ‘a brief alimentary affair’). Though the writing is at times overwrought, at other times it evokes a charming Stephen Fry-esque wryness (ancient trees existing ‘until humanity began the bipedal busywork of extraction and emission’).

The manuscript for Children of Tomorrow was highly commended in the 2021 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards and contributes to a fast-growing body of Australian and international cli-fi. That the term appears anywhere from the SMH to Oprah Daily suggests that it is well and truly in the mainstream. It may also suggest that the growing presence of climate change in our lives and therefore our fiction may eventually render the term obsolete.

Although the novel’s world-building is rich and convincing, I was surprised to find myself largely inured to its catastrophic vision. This may be partially because the episodic narrative is frequently delivered in ‘summary mode’, a detached omniscience that puts a distance between reader and story. I suspect, though, that it is mostly because the climate emergency can feel disturbingly like old news – something we acknowledged with the rise of Greta Thunberg but eventually moved on from with a bad case of climate fatigue. (Deb Anderson explored this vexed issue in her ABR review of the non-fiction The Uninhabitable Earth: A story of the future by David Wallace-Wells.)

What climate fatigue means for people facing this ‘unnavigable abyss’ is a question of which Burgmann is mindful. Children of Tomorrow considers the differences between millennials’ ‘epidemic of eco-anxiety, which eased as hope became more and more impossible’ versus future generations, ‘children of Greta’, who were born into the reality of a failing planet. Though the millennials are haunted by regret, their role throughout the century is largely that of ‘cataloguing the decline’ and ‘chronicling the collapse’ –recording it rather than preventing it. Many enact brave but sadly inconsequential acts of resistance. A courageous elderly professor, who battles against tree destruction to his last, offers Arne ‘the kindest thing he can to someone who will live through great change: ways to hold still and consider the world as it really is’. Like Evie’s survey of coral bleaching, dubbed ‘a eulogy in the form of data’, Children of Tomorrow is a lament for a future lost. This thought-provoking novel also interrogates the role of writers in this moment in history. Journalist, novelist, and ‘key Twittering voice’ Wally Weatherall harnesses mass communication in the hope of change. Wally develops ‘The Climate Chronicle’ – an augmented reality resource that uses data visualisation to close ‘a psychological gap, a distance through which a stealthy denial of the horror could be maintained’. The Chronicle ‘raised climate literacy to near universal levels … a bridge between data and emotion for billions of people’ – yet disaster was not avoided. What our generation is doing won’t be enough to stem the (literal) tide, Burgmann seems to say. For his characters, ‘True change will remain a chimera’.

I write this review just as the climate scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issue a ‘survival guide for humanity’, warning that the window to reduce emissions is closing. An Australian ecologist, Professor Lesley Hughes, tells the ABC that ‘what happens in the next seven years would be vital if we’re to leave a world that’s habitable for our children and grandchildren’. Children of Tomorrow proposes a bleak vision of what might happen should we fail. g