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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.

J.R. Burgmann鈥檚 debut novel,聽, nods to the latter argument through its epigraph, a passage from Richard Powers鈥櫬�. 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 鈥渁 few lost people鈥� 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鈥檚 academic work concerns the genre often known as 鈥渃li-fi鈥�, 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 鈥渙ld realisms no one heeded鈥�

Children of Tomorrow is a classic example of 鈥渃li-fi鈥�, showing what we can expect if we fail to lower carbon emissions. But it is also engaged by questions of the form鈥檚 efficacy and function.

When we meet them in 2016, the novel鈥檚 small cast of characters are millennials, 鈥渃hildren of the age of infinite growth鈥�, committed in various ways to averting total climate catastrophe. There is Arne Bakke, borne of a long line of Tasmanian loggers but now studying trees and rewilding, and Evie Weatherall, a dynamic British woman in Australia to study marine science.

After falling in love, Arne and Evie move from Melbourne, a city on fire, to London, a city that in some not-too-distant future floods catastrophically.

Evie鈥檚 cousin Wally is a celebrity in the true 21st century sense of the word: he is a sometime climate journalist, sometime musician, a style influencer, a popular Twitter personality. The group of friends is rounded out by Arne鈥檚 brother Freddie, who begins as a 鈥渟hredded poster boy for global environmental activism鈥� but ends an eco-terrorist; John, a First Nations philosopher, and Kim, a Korean woman researching green cities.

Later in the century, the group expands to include Arne and Evie鈥檚 children, Jasmine and Raphael, 鈥渃hildren of Greta鈥� who despise their Millennial forebears鈥� failure to avert the disaster they must live through.

Children of Tomorrow is split into three parts, Century鈥檚 Beginning, Century鈥檚 Middle, Century鈥檚 End. This places it within a growing suite of novels by authors such as David Mitchell and Annie Proulx that engage with the history of humanity鈥檚 impact on the earth through longer-than-usual timespans. Mitchell鈥檚 Cloud Atlas (2004) and Proulx鈥檚 Barkskins (2016) are chunky novels. Children of Tomorrow is a relatively brisk 259 pages. Its style is episodic rather than epic, the narrative unspooling through a series of loosely connected scenes and encounters.

This fragmentary quality is intensified by Upswell鈥檚 decision to use line breaks instead of indentations to mark paragraphs in its books. The overall effect is disorientation and rupture, meaning the reading experience resembles the characters鈥� attempts to navigate a world made increasingly strange by climate crisis.

础耻迟丑辞谤听聽has famously argued that the realist novel鈥檚 devotion to observation of character, emotion and ordinary events, summarised by the familiar adage 鈥渟how, don鈥檛 tell鈥�, has limited the form鈥檚 capacity to engage with the seemingly improbable fact of climate change and its outsize effects.

In line with this critique, Burgmann鈥檚 novel often tells rather than shows. Significant climate catastrophes are not directly narrated but mentioned after they occur, so the list of disasters grows as the novel continues: the Long Heat, an energy coup, 鈥渁 season of asthma鈥�, storm surges, sea level rise and poisoned oceans, Melbourne鈥檚 first 50 degrees day.

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 鈥渄isplaced millions鈥�? 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 鈥渢o narrate what we鈥檙e doing to the planet鈥�. 鈥淵ou want to write a novel about climate change?鈥� Evie asks. 鈥淣o,鈥� Wally replies 鈥渆mphatically鈥�. He wants to create 鈥渟omething 鈥� sufficient.鈥�

He wants to 鈥渃hronicle鈥� the crisis, create 鈥渁 ledger, a witness statement of sorts鈥�. 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.

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鈥� actions 鈥� Arne鈥檚 rewilding, Evie鈥檚 marine science, Wally鈥檚 writing 鈥� matter at all, in the end. This comes close to what聽, 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 鈥渂rave new children of this world are awakening鈥�. But there are discomforting elements here too. The one child-free woman in the narrative, Kim, regrets that instead of 鈥渞aising beautiful little beings, she had spent her life making beautiful things鈥�.

This educated and engaged woman鈥檚 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鈥檚 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 鈥渉ow fat kids and teenagers used to be鈥�. Only thin children, apparently, are the future. Burgmann deals with thorny issues in Children of Tomorrow, but thorny issues sometimes beget problematic writing.

Dr Meg Brayshaw is the John Rowe Lecturer in Australian Literature. Dr Brayshaw researches and teaches Australian literature, with a special interest in literary engagements with place, climate and sustainability. She is the unit coordinator of a new English unit in 2023 called Climate Fictions.

This story was first published in The Conversation as

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