The Long Heat, an energy coup, a season of asthma … new Australian cli-fi novel Children of Tomorrow challenges the form but is rife with contradictions
- Written by Meg Brayshaw, John Rowe Lecturer in Australian Literature, University of Sydney
For at least the past decade, writers and critics have been debating the capacity of literary fiction to represent the realities of climate change. Some argue fiction is one of our best tools for reckoning with a world transfigured by anthropogenic warming. Others believe traditional narrative modes are unable to properly engage with the scale of the catastrophe: they are too anthropocentric, too domestic, too local.
Review: Children of Tomorrow - J.R. Burgmann (Upswell)
J.R. Burgmann’s debut novel, Children of Tomorrow, nods to the latter argument through its epigraph, a passage from Richard Powers’ The Overstory. Ray, bed-bound after a stroke, chastises himself for indulging in the consolations of fiction:
To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one, and to mistake life for something huge with two legs. No: life is mobilised on a vastly larger scale, and 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 Children of Tomorrow, Burgmann tests this proposition. At its core is “a few lost people” but their struggles are placed in a narrative that ranges across the 21st century, as the world increasingly loses the contest against climate devastation.
Burgmann’s academic work concerns the genre often known as “cli-fi”, literature that depicts climate change and crisis. His novel draws from many examples of this mode, name-checking writers Margaret Atwood, James Bradley and Kim Stanley Robinson. The novels of these masters of speculative climate fiction are by mid-century regarded by one character as “old realisms no one heeded”.
Smoke haze over Melbourne’s Yarra river.
David Crosling/AAP
At times the technique can be jarring. A world-destroying cataclysm is recounted thus:
governments topple and systems once thought inviolable collapse. Displaced millions fall out into the ravening cavalcades, rolling across the Earth in search of their share.
This onslaught of destruction without extrapolation risks sacrificing one thing that the novel as a form does do well: empathy. What would it be like to be one of those “displaced millions”? What would it feel like to live through a 50-degree day?
But perhaps we should not expect from Children of Tomorrow what we might expect from a novel. In an early scene, Wally tells his friends he is working on a new project called the Climate Chronicle. He wants “to narrate what we’re doing to the planet”. “You want to write a novel about climate change?” Evie asks. “No”, Wally replies “emphatically”. He wants to create “something … sufficient.”
He wants to “chronicle” the crisis, create “a ledger, a witness statement of sorts”. If the novel is not a sufficient form, perhaps Burgmann intends his book to serve as a kind of climate chronicle: a record of a world that is not yet born but might be soon.
At its heart, though, Children of Tomorrow is a familiar story: Evie and Arne fall in love, they have children, and they raise those children.
The novel relies heavily on dialogue in interactions between Evie, Arne, their friendship group and their children, as a way of representing or retelling larger events and forces. Of course, there is nothing wrong with using a family to anchor a narrative about climate change, except the novel itself suggests our inability to care beyond ourselves and our loved ones is responsible, in part, for the crisis. Wally, for instance,
feels the warm glow of family, that peculiar kinfolk sense, a savannah sickness that imperils the planet. The real clan is one and greater, stretching back billions of years to a common root called life.
The novel deploys familiar narrative patterns even as it critiques them. This is a contradiction it struggles to resolve.
Read more:
'Cli-fi' novels humanise the science of climate change – and leading authors are getting in on the act
We have the technology …
There are other contradictions and elisions. There is a lot of witnessing of catastrophe in this book, but not a lot of engagement with the broader structural forces that bring it about. There is little sense that the characters’ actions — Arne’s rewilding, Evie’s marine science, Wally’s writing — matter at all, in the end. This comes close to what Andreas Malm calls the “reification of despair”, a response to the climate crisis that suggests there is little point struggling for a better future.
As its title would suggest, Children of Tomorrow is invested in the trope of children as hope. As catastrophe mounts we are reassured the “brave new children of this world are awakening”. But there are discomforting elements here too. The one child-free woman in the narrative, Kim, regrets that instead of “raising beautiful little beings, she had spent her life making beautiful things”.
This educated and engaged woman’s longing is so intense she spends her evenings using futuristic technology to simulate pregnancy and birth.
In another off-putting scene, Arne eats a piece of forbidden meat in front of his horrified grandchild, Jasmine’s daughter Aloy, who we are told is determined to go out into the world and help it recover. Encircling her upper arm with his hand, he remembers “how fat kids and teenagers used to be”. Only thin children, apparently, are the future. Burgmann deals with thorny issues in Children of Tomorrow, but thorny issues sometimes beget problematic writing.
Children in the Eureka Tower look at the Melbourne CBD as smoke haze from the 2020 bushfires hangs over it.
David Crosling/AAP
I have always doubted the assertion (to return to Powers’ lines) that the world is failing because “no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people”. To me this seems somehow both an enormous overestimation of the novel’s power and a grim underestimation of its true efficacy.
Novels aren’t responsible for the climate crisis and they probably won’t solve it, but there is still plenty they can do. At its best, the novel can make us feel for human and nonhuman lives unlike our own; it can bring us into contact with the world as it existed long before we were here and long after we will go. It can model careful thinking, critical analysis, complex processes of cause and effect — all of which we need more of if we are to save ourselves.
For those reasons, I’m not quite ready to transcend the novel in the way Burgmann suggests we must.
By the middle of the 21st century, Wally’s Climate Chronicle becomes a “multimedia megahit”, a digital interface that augments how users see the world.
Wally describes it as a “bridge between data and emotion”, and at one point the characters use it to rewind the world in real time. They “look back through the centuries: towers rising and falling, people coming and going, the Earth changing rapidly”.
We don’t need this technology because we already have it. It is called the novel.
Authors: Meg Brayshaw, John Rowe Lecturer in Australian Literature, University of Sydney
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