Tag Archive for: speculative fiction

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Jeff VanderMeer | Area X

 

Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach series, beginning with the iconic trilogy—Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptanceand extending to the fourth volume, Absolution, is an immersive, often disturbing exploration of the unknowable forces of nature, and humanity’s inability to understand and govern them. In evoking the uncanniness of plant and animal life in the mysterious nature reserve-cum-force-field known as Area X, VanderMeer offers a nuanced encounter with a universe that is simultaneously beautiful, horrifying, and transformative. This collection that cements his status as one of the most innovative writers of contemporary speculative literature.

 

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How High We Go in the Dark | Sequoia Nagamatsu

 

“Even in the face of endings, we invent new forms of love.”

This dazzling, deeply affecting novel transcends genre to explore grief, resilience, and the boundless scope of human imagination in the face of catastrophe. Set in a future shaped by the accidental thawing of an ancient Arctic virus, the book traces a constellation of interconnected lives across time and space, forming a narrative of sorrow and hope that is both intimate and epic.

Nagamatsu’s structure—linked stories rather than a single linear narrative—mirrors the unpredictability and fragmentation of the global crisis, yet each chapter is a self-contained world: from a theme park designed to ease terminally ill children into death, to a pig genetically engineered to host the consciousness of a grieving father’s daughter, Nagamatsu envisions futures that are strange, tender, and eerily plausible.

At its heart, the novel is an inquiry into what remains when so much is lost. Nagamatsu does not offer solutions, but glimpses of connection—between people, across time, through death, and beyond. The novel is suffused with grief, but it also pulses with a quiet, radical hope: that even on a dying planet, love and wonder are not extinct.

 

THE MARS HOUSE | NATASHA PULLEY

 

 

“Hands down, Natasha Pulley is one of the greatest writers of our generation.  If the human race survives beyond this crisis point, I fully expect our descendants to look back on her entire body of work as little short of genius. Her shaping of language, of character and the clarity and skill of her plots – to say nothing of the deeply scientific underlay and the rather clever experiments with time, leaves me ever in awe.

None of her books to date has been strictly Thrutopian- until now. If we stretch points a little, The Mars House is an examination of how things can go very, very badly wrong – and potentially how human nature leans towards decency in the end.” – Manda Scott

 

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NOTES FROM THE BURNING AGE | CLAIRE NORTH

 

Claire North started writing when she was 14 years old.  This doesn’t guarantee that she’s a writing genius – but actually, she is. Notes from the Burning Age is set in a post-apocalyptic future where The Burning Age is a time remembered with great fear: humanity pushed too hard and the spirits of the earth, returned to exact…not quite revenge because they don’t care about people, but they did what they must to stop further damage and humanity barely survived…magically written.” – Manda Scott

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Earth | David Brin

Decades from now, an artificial black hole has fallen into the Earth’s core. As scientists frantically work to prevent the ultimate disaster, they discover that the entire planet could be destroyed within a year.

But while they look for an answer, some claim that the only way to save Earth is to let its human inhabitants become extinct: to reset the evolutionary clock and start over.

‘This book is not just a green globe-trotting adventure; it is also a thoughtful mix of warnings and promise.” – The Guardian

 

Read our Librarian’s top climate change fiction picks by heading to our Fiction section

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The Carbon Diaries 2015 | Saci Lloyd

It’s January 1st, 2015, and the UK is the first nation to introduce carbon dioxide rationing, in a drastic bid to combat climate change. As her family spirals out of control, Laura Brown chronicles the first year of rationing with scathing abandon. Will her mother become one with her inner wolf? Will her sister give up her weekends in Ibiza? Does her father love the pig more than her? Can her band The Dirty Angels make it big? And will Ravi Datta ever notice her?

In these dark days, Laura deals with the issues that really matter: love, floods and pigs.

The Carbon Diaries 2015 is one girl’s drastic bid to stay sane in a world unravelling at the seams.

 

Read our Librarian’s top climate change fiction picks by heading to our Fiction section

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The World According to Anna | Jostein Gaarder

When fifteen-year-old Anna begins receiving messages from another time, her parents take her to the doctor. But he can find nothing wrong; in fact he believes there may be some truth to what she is seeing. Anna is haunted by visions of the desolate world of 2082. She sees her great-granddaughter, Nova, roaming through wasteland with a band of survivors, after animals and plants have died out. The more Anna sees, the more she realises she must act to prevent the future in her visions becoming real.

But can she act quickly enough?

 

Read our Librarian’s top climate change fiction picks by heading to our Fiction section

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The Healer | Antti Tuomainen

It’s two days before Christmas and Helsinki is battling ruthless climate catastrophe: subway tunnels are flooded; abandoned vehicles are burning in the streets. People are fleeing to the far north where conditions are still tolerable. Social order is crumbling and private security firms have undermined the police force. Tapani Lehtinen, a struggling poet, is among the few still willing to live in the city.

When Tapani’s wife Johanna, a journalist, goes missing, he embarks on a frantic hunt for her. Johanna’s disappearance seems to be connected to a story she was researching about a serial killer known as ‘The Healer’. Determined to find Johanna, Tapani’s search leads him to uncover secrets from her past: secrets that connect her to the very murders she was investigating…

Atmospheric and moving, The Healer is a story of survival, loyalty and determination. Even when the world is coming to an end, love and hope endure.

 

Read our Librarian’s top climate change fiction picks by heading to our Fiction section

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The Book of Dave | Will Self

What if a demented London cabbie called Dave Rudman wrote a book to his estranged son to give him some fatherly advice? And what if that book was buried in Hampstead and hundreds of years later, when rising sea levels have put London underwater, spawned a religion?

What if one man decided to question life according to Dave? And what if Dave had indeed made a mistake?Shuttling between the recent past and a far-off future where England is terribly altered, The Book of Dave is a strange and troubling mirror held up to our times: disturbing, satirising and vilifying who and what we think we are.

At once a meditation upon the nature of received religion, a love story, a caustic satire of contemporary urban life and a historical detective story set in the far future – this compulsive novel will be enjoyed by readers everywhere, including fans of Martin Amis and Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange.

 

Read our Librarian’s top climate change fiction picks by heading to our Fiction section

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Odds Against Tomorrow | Nathaniel Rich

New York City, the near future: Mitchell Zukor works on the cutting edge of corporate irresponsibility, and business is booming. A gifted mathematician, he spends his days in Manhattan calculating worst-case scenarios for FutureWorld, a consulting firm that indemnifies corporations against potential disasters. As Mitchell immerses himself in the mathematics of catastrophe, he exchanges letters with Elsa Bruner – a college crush with an apocalyptic secret of her own – and becomes obsessed by a culture’s fears. When his predictions culminate in a nightmarish crescendo, Mitchell realises he is uniquely prepared to profit from the disaster. But at what cost?

 

Read our Librarian’s top climate change fiction picks by heading to our Fiction section