Sunday, September 11, 2022

The High House



Francesca, a climate scientist, and her husband secretly prepare their home, high on a protected bluff, to shelter against the coming environmental crisis, a significant flooding event. Called overseas to help with the global policy effort, they enlist the help of neighbours, Grandy and his granddaughter, Sally, to maintain the 'high house', and care for their teen daughter, Caro, and young son, Pauly.

Deservedly shortlisted for the 2021 Costa Novel Awards, The author, Jessie Greengrass, takes the reader on a family's intimate journey through the coming climate disaster. Told from alternating first-person POVs of Sally, Caro, and Pauly as they face the impending floods from the vantage point of their home, safely perched high above the rising ocean.


I connected with their unfolding distress, having faced the impact of flooding, albeit less deadly. I remember feeling helpless as the swelling river banks engulfed many homes while I watched from a high-rise unit with a birdseye view of the emergency. It is a surreal feeling. On the one hand, my immediate area was unaffected. Yet below, an emergency unfolded under the ever-present news choppers, bringing constant television updates.


The narrative is told mainly in chronological order. Still, occasionally the characters' fate is mentioned early in the story, but that never softens the tension as they all realise that the irreversible climate crisis worsens. The High House is a powerful story that reminded me of Cormack McCarthy's The Road. A must-read for climate deniers. 5 STARS

Friday, September 2, 2022

A Climate of Revenge

 


Sarah and JanetM, are a human/Artificial Intelligence pair who do private investigations in the near future where our climate crisis has hit and hit hard.  A man with a long dark history tries to hire them but is then killed.  His family hires the team to find who killed this man with a thousand enemies in a land with a million problems.  


The United Nations IPCC report, “Climate Change 2022, Impacts, Adaption and Vulnerability contains:  


C5.3 Enhancing knowledge

A wide range of … processes … can deepen climate knowledge and sharing, including … using the arts … (high confidence).


This can only be read as a clarion call for writers to produce the works that will help our people cope.  



My Review


A Climate of Revenge by Tom Riley is a Cli-Fi novel that follows a human/AI pair, Sarah and JanetM, as they go about solving a murder investigation - one that the police initially believe Sarah is a suspect.


Riley is a career scientist who has switched to writing climate fiction novels, a genre dealing with life on Earth ravaged by climate change. Like most authors in this emergent genre, Riley recognises the dangers of the climate crisis and wants to change readers' (and writers') attitudes. His work is a response to the IPCC's clarion call for others, particularly writers, to join the scientists and policymakers in deepening everyone's knowledge about global warming.


His background and experience shone through. The climate science described in A Climate of Revenge was fascinating, from the everyday responses, community gardening, to loftier strategies such as Cloud Brightening to protect the Earth's permafrost from melting. The reader is right there with Sarah as she navigates an increasingly depleted world. The technology is also seamlessly layered into this future world, highlighting its crucial role in monitoring the unfolding crisis. AI technology, ranging from personal assistants (JanetM) to boats and houses, was imaginative and believable. The interplay between AIs added layers to the many tech-driven characters. For example, an AI purgatory where the unwanted old models went was a unique and believable idea.


These elements alone enabled me to forgive the weaknesses within the storytelling. The investigation remained the secondary side story to the creative world-building. I read the draft PDF version, so I anticipate the author will tighten some of the sub-plots, address stilted dialogue and check the frequent grammatical errors before publishing.


That said, readers and writers with a genuine interest in the 'challenge of our time' will appreciate this book. A helpful appendix provides a scientist's perspective on what is or is not believable science of the future.  


Climate fiction is an emergent genre that, at its core, presents credible natural science. Significantly, Cli-Fi can help us imagine these experiences more vividly than endless scientific graphs of temperature variations. The choice between one, two or three degrees change in global temperature is actively messaged on mainstream and social media. Yet rational messaging is still not effectively cutting through, where perhaps the emotion and poetry of fiction could: 

"The whole complicated system of modernity which had held us up, away from the earth, was crumbling....and we were becoming again what we used to be: cold and frightened of the weather, and frightened of the dark." (Jessie Greengrass's The High House.)


For those not yet swayed by the climate crisis, start by reading A Climate of Revenge. It might just make you decide to become part of the movement for change. 4 STARS



Excerpt 


Chapter 1.  A Long Night


Sarah walked out of the restaurant past the taxi lane and into the dark parking lot.  The charging kiosks threw patches of dim light barely enough to walk by, but they lit up when anyone approached.  If anyone was sneaking around in the lot, the kiosks would surely have given them away.  There was no moon, the stars were just coming out, but the heat of the day was hanging on for a while.


The dinner appointment had been a waste of time, the ex-executive who had booked the table was only interested in hiring her to promote his I’m-a-good-guy-now agenda by getting the dirt on his enemies one way or another.  Sarah had no patience with such greenwashing.


What did he call himself, Winestead?  She knew she had heard that name before, but where?  JanetM would have a complete dossier by morning.  Anyway his story did not make much sense; he was hiding something.  Only god knew what sins against the Earth this man had already committed.


Sarah was not interested in his building a new facade; he could keep his money.  To make matters worse, the dinner was one of those little-food-and-fancy-plates affairs.  The whole experience left Sarah feeling still hungry and irritable.  The interview had gone on for much too long.



AUTHOR Bio and Links


After an extensive career at NASA as an Instrument Engineer, Tom Riley started a people-based space program, The Big Moon Dig, compatible with the needs of our climate crisis. Our climate crisis clearly must now come first, and that effort needed positive stories of people in action. 


Amazon

iUniverse








GIVEAWAY 


Tom Riley will be awarding a PDF file of "Writer's Guide to Our Climate Crisis" (International) to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.


Enter to win a writer's guide on climate change - a Rafflecopter giveaway HERE