- Publisher: Titan Books (UK)
- Publication date: 09/05/2017
- Pages: 320
- ISBN: 9781785654145
- Author: James Bradley
Clade by James Bradley is a dystopian tale of a self-destructing Earth in the not too distant future, through the eyes of a single extended family. The environment and society are breaking down under the weight of global warming driven floods and pandemics and environmental collapse and social upheaval. Much of Earth is or is becoming uninhabitable. One fairly well-to-do family in Australia experiences the impacts both directly and indirectly over the course of several generations.
The book is written with an interesting style. It is almost like a series of vignettes with a different main character in each one, though there is overlap to the previous stories. A man, studying Antarctic warming, and his wife, an artist, and their attempts to have a child; their parents, step parents and in-laws; their child and her child; and others living semi ‘normal’ lives in the wake of various incredibly destructive happenings.
I think the power of this book is that it does not have to come to any specific resolution for any of the stories. Things happen and people react to them, then other things happen. There is a great juxtaposition between normality (the kids just wanting to look at their ‘lenses’) vs the major global calamities all around the world. There are personal stories of marriage and divorce and friends lost and friend found, but always going on in the background or foreground, is another collapse, another catastrophe. This balancing of the personal with the global makes it feel more real.
This book may be written off as science fiction, but it brings up some very real possibilities for our world. The author seems very prescient. Published in 2017, it includes a respiratory viral pandemic that arises in China and spreads around the world. It includes details of increased flooding and collapse of some (bee) species. Everything in this book is just a (hopefully) exaggerated view of processes that are currently underway in our world. This can be enjoyed as a fictional story about a dystopian world, but it should also be considered a warning of the type of future we may be making for ourselves if we don’t do more to curb climate change and other environmental impacts.
I highly recommend Clade for both purposes.
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Another tale of unintended environmental impacts.
Plastivore by Matt Truxaw
