"Clade" by James Bradley

About a week ago I saw Lucy Treloar tweet about another book by James Bradley called "Ghost Species" that sounded right up my alley. Unfortunately when I looked it up to purchase it I discovered it appears she must have read a pre-release copy as it's not due to be published for a couple of months. Then I was at my local bookshop buying a book for a birthday present for a friend and stumbled across another book by the same author and thought I'd give it a go in the meantime. Plus I loved the cover art, and it mentioned bees so I thought if it's a good book my parents might enjoy it too as they keep bees.

I was really impressed by the scientific details and predictions brought to life in this story coupled with the way the author manages to capture human reactions to our changing world. It seems scarily prescient of the direction the world is travelling in, particularly if you read things like the 2019 IPCC Climate Report or follow respected independent climate organisations like Australia's Climate Council. While the catastrophic 'natural' events unfolding in this book at times may seem a little unreal and over the top, mostly they are along the lines of what is predicted by even moderate/conservative climate scientists and environmentalists today. What really brought the reality home was how many of these almost over the top scenarios are also normalised by the characters reactions to them, the way they acknowledge it's too late to fix things now the warnings were ignored and that these crazy extreme disasters really are "the new normal". When one of the characters is at a tropical rave party with futuristic glasses "overlays" that allow the user to see "dragons swoop and turn, their paths criss-crossed by birds and other magical creatures" it made my soul cry.

The book is broken down into different chapters, each one told from a different characters point of view. The characters are all mostly connected to each other in some way, but it's not always evident immediately what the connection is. Characters voices are children, teenagers, adults, grandparents. All dealing with the chaos and trying to live their lives with different levels of experience and perspective. It's a great way of telling the story from different points of view.

Probably the most unexpectedly eerie part of the book for me was when I reached the chapter  narrated by a Sydney-based teenager, Li Lijuan, which is written in diary format. Her Mum has gone to China to look after Li's sick aunt and while her Mum is over in China a sudden and apparently  isolated outbreak of a novel respiratory disease arises. There are reports of a cover up by authorities, then external contact with people in China is shut down. Suddenly cases of the disease - Acute Viral Respiratory Syndrome (AVRS) - are popping up in other countries, everyone is glued to ther social media following maps and counters showing the spread... then "October 26. It's here. Two cases in Melbourne, three in Sydney"...it becomes apparent that transmission is possible in the days before symptoms develop... people start trying to isolate themselves, scientists are working on a cure but that could be months or years away...there's speculation about if the disease crossed the species barrier in China or was engineered by pharma as people start to panic and invent conspiracy theories. Looting and hoarding is going on. Watching this chapter unfold in Li's diaries is so similar to how the current Coronavirus COVID19 situation is unfolding it was quite eerie but also mesmerising. Just one example of how this author is great at reading not only the science but also human behaviour and weaving the two into a very believable story. 

This author was new to me...but I will definitely be reading more of his books and am eagerly awaiting the upcoming "Ghost Species". 

Started reading: 8th March 2020
Finished: 10th March 2020
My score: 8/10
Aussie author challenge stats: Male author, new author to me, speculative fiction, contemporary fiction, climate change.

"Wolfe Island" by Lucy Treloar

I loved Lucy Treloar's "Salt Creek", and was eagerly awaiting her latest novel. "Wolfe Island" did not disappoint... I was hooked right away by the beautiful writing, interesting setting and characters. Speculative fiction, but scarily feels like it could easily be where we are headed in 10-20 years from now.

Started reading: 7th December 2019
Finished: early January 2020
My score: 8/10

Aussie Author Challenge: Female author, historical/speculative fiction?

"Dyschronia" by Jennifer Mills

"Dyschronia" by Jennifer Mills is one of the short-listed books for the Miles Franklin 2019 awards. It is set in South Australia and has an environmental/climate change angle which of course makes it a must-read book for me.

The first thing I want to say about this book is that Jennifer Mills' writing is beautiful, unique, and skillful. I wrote down several quotes from the book as I read it because I was so captivated by the words and how she captured the tricky ways in which time can seem to move:

"Three years since she'd seen Ivy, maybe four. Twice that long since she had left saying she needed time, as if time wasn't everywhere, seeping into every crevice."

"It wasn't right the way these moments, the worst moments, could tear out of their resting places. As if nothing ever passed into history, as if everything was only another layer of now, sticking over and over itself like old wallpaper."

"And time came off it's axis and rolled away".

"Time doesn't stop until it stops for good. It only heals until it kills."

These are just some of the examples of the way time is described in "Dyschronia", and similarly other concepts, are written in a multitude of different ways that each seems to capture the essence of the thing being described so perfectly, only to have that thing described again in a completely different way at another point in the story that is perfect from another view.

The book itself can be hard to follow in some ways, deliberately so, as most of the book is told from the point of view of Sam, who suffers from migraines that appear to forewarn of the future, and each chapter jumps back and forth in time and between what is really happening and what Sam has 'seen' through her migraines over several decades of her life. As I have read mentioned elsewhere, the other chapters of the book are reminiscent of the 'chorus' from Greek Tragedies like King Lear or Antigone, and are told from the point of the collective town members.

The story itself is dystopian/speculative fiction, set in South Australia in a town called Clapstone with many similarities to real world Whyalla, including multiple references to the giant cuttlefish that spawn in that special part of the world. The book deals with climate change, it appears to be set in the very close future, and looking back at our current time in a nostalgic way, but this is mixed with a depressing acceptance of the new reality of unviable land, forced relocations of towns and cities, living in 'domes', never-ending drought, the death of all sea life, hardly any birds except drones that look like birds or caged pet budgies.. the book is quite bleak, and depressing, because it feels like this is eerily familiar to what we are on the cusp of now with the general apathy and lack of leadership in this country to address global warming and the climate crisis with the urgency and seriousness that it deserves. It's like we are sleep-walking into a dystopian migraine of a future that seems all too credible:

"For our generation, the course of life seemed tilted towards growth. The boom was infinite, like the ocean."

"But there's no safe, not after tomorrow. We exist between emergencies, emergency responses, more emergencies."

I would give this book 10/10 for the writing and the uniqueness, but I'm giving it 9/10 overall because I found the last few chapters unsatisfying in tying up the loose ends and was a bit confusing. It was probably intentional, and maybe I was unsatisfied because I wanted a positive outcome, but the ending is probably more in keeping with the themes of the book.

Started reading on my kindle: 4th August 2019
Finished: 13th September 2019
My score: 9/10

Aussie Author stats: female author, new author to me, dystopian/speculative fiction genre.

"Unsheltered" by Barbara Kingsolver

Started reading on my kindle when I was travelling in Dec 2018, maybe 12th Dec 2018.

Finished: 27th January 2019
My score: 8/10

This is the latest novel by Barbara Kingsolver, I usually really like her books, and so far this is a good one too.

This book alternates between two different stories, both set in the same house in Vineland USA, but one story is set in the time of Charles Darwin in the 1800s, where the debate between the established religious belief and the new scientific theory of Evolution was hugely controversial, and the other is set in current times, where despite the author's statement that "among the novel's twenty-first century characters, any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental" there are quite obvious references to Trump as "the Bullhorn", a Billionaire running for President that boasts he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and people would still vote for him"....etc.
The underlying theme is to showcase the similarities in the incredulous reaction to evolution in the 1800s and how 'head in the sand' many people were in the face of what we now see as obvious, and the current situation we face with severe effects of global warming on our doorstep and the inaction and denial of it by many of our political leaders. Barbara Kingsolver was a biologist before she became a writer and I'm sure it's one of the reasons I love her books so much, they are great human dramas, well written, but with important underlying messages embedded. This one has climate change and sustainable living and evolution woven throughout, plus a fair measure of equity for women. Science Communication by subtle and powerful means through a novel. :-)

I was only slightly disappointed by the ending or I would have scored it 9-10/10 instead of 8.

"Flight Behaviour" by Barbara Kingsolver

This is the first book I've read by this author. It was a bit slow to start, but I really enjoyed it when I got into it. This story is about the Monarch butterflies that migrate massive distances from South America to Northern America, one of the fascinating biological events in the world that intrigue me. The interesting biology of the butterflies and the problems of climate change are interwoven with a generational family drama set in a rural setting. At first I thought the book was set maybe 100 years ago as the farm life and attitudes of the main characters seemed so out of touch, but then references to modern things like iPads made me realise that it was set in current times, and as the story developed it revealed a community where University/College education was rarely aspired to, most families would be considered disadvantaged and were struggling to make ends meet by farming, and the general population gave more credibility to the commercial tv news presenters than to scientists on topics like climate change. It is a really good novel, combining the science and environmental issues with a family drama of a style reminiscent to me of Jodi Picoult's books.

Started reading on my kindle: 19th December 2014
Finished: 28th December 2014
My score: 7.5/10