Latest news with #SalvageJennifer
The Age
18-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
This new cli-fi novel envisages a more hopeful apocalypse
FICTION SalvageJennifer Mills Picador, $34.99 In Salvage, Jennifer Mills lets the billionaires escape our dying planet on a space station with a VIP list. And then she leaves them there to rot. This is Mills' first, fully fledged science-fiction novel to portray the before and after of ecological apocalypse, but it continues her merging of the uncanny or speculative with her artistic instinct for spatial and psychological choreography. In other words, Mills' novels begin by asking: what kind of world is this? But the focus is always on what it feels like to inhabit these unusual worlds. The Airways, Mills' previous novel, was ostensibly a queer fabulist horror story about a ghost seeking revenge. But this hook was masquerading a second, more experimental desire to assign a new form of language to this state of being. Dyschronia, which was short-listed for the 2019 Miles Franklin prize, ventured into weird fiction, imagining the desolation after the shore receded from an Australian coastal town, converting it overnight into a location of dark tourism – much to the chagrin of the few inhabitants who refused to leave. Taken all together, Mills' fiction continually returns to hauntings; her works explore how spectres from the past are eternally resurrecting in the present. Salvage is told through three interchanging sections. The first introduces us to Jude, living through the post-apocalypse by helping a loose collective of sovereign territories known as the Freelands. They implement forms of anarchy – non-hierarchical governance, direct democracy, the abolition of ownership – which history tells us works incredibly well in smaller factions but has never produced a viable macro-vision for the future. The Freelands exist on the fringes of a technologically and militarily superior state called The Alliance, which is governed by the antithesis: strict order, class, the rule of law. Each of these societies, given an opportunity to reinvent themselves, find older ideologies guiding how they rebuild the world from the scraps of older civilisations. Which way was it to utopia again? As a young girl, Jude was adopted by a billionaire, who later died in a helicopter crash. Jude's sister, Celeste, inherited the family fortune and invested it in space station project Endeavour, in which self-appointed chosen ones were given a seat on board this arc-like saviour, orbiting the Earth in a chemically induced torpor to 'sleep through the worst'. The second sections of Salvage are narrated by Celeste, on board Endeavour, shuffling at intervals down corridors, knocking into other boutique cosmonauts, looking for her sister. They soon suspect they've been abandoned or tricked, and strange occurrences and malfunctions do nothing to ease the nerves. In the third section, Jude and Celeste are together, before the apocalypse. They exist in a fortified complex called Sovereign House, basically a military bunker sequestered from the suffering and ruin experienced by everyone else. In these passages, we see Celeste persuaded by the mad billionaire looking for investors into his space station project, while Jude becomes disenchanted with her sister's myopic privilege.
Sydney Morning Herald
18-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
This new cli-fi novel envisages a more hopeful apocalypse
FICTION SalvageJennifer Mills Picador, $34.99 In Salvage, Jennifer Mills lets the billionaires escape our dying planet on a space station with a VIP list. And then she leaves them there to rot. This is Mills' first, fully fledged science-fiction novel to portray the before and after of ecological apocalypse, but it continues her merging of the uncanny or speculative with her artistic instinct for spatial and psychological choreography. In other words, Mills' novels begin by asking: what kind of world is this? But the focus is always on what it feels like to inhabit these unusual worlds. The Airways, Mills' previous novel, was ostensibly a queer fabulist horror story about a ghost seeking revenge. But this hook was masquerading a second, more experimental desire to assign a new form of language to this state of being. Dyschronia, which was short-listed for the 2019 Miles Franklin prize, ventured into weird fiction, imagining the desolation after the shore receded from an Australian coastal town, converting it overnight into a location of dark tourism – much to the chagrin of the few inhabitants who refused to leave. Taken all together, Mills' fiction continually returns to hauntings; her works explore how spectres from the past are eternally resurrecting in the present. Salvage is told through three interchanging sections. The first introduces us to Jude, living through the post-apocalypse by helping a loose collective of sovereign territories known as the Freelands. They implement forms of anarchy – non-hierarchical governance, direct democracy, the abolition of ownership – which history tells us works incredibly well in smaller factions but has never produced a viable macro-vision for the future. The Freelands exist on the fringes of a technologically and militarily superior state called The Alliance, which is governed by the antithesis: strict order, class, the rule of law. Each of these societies, given an opportunity to reinvent themselves, find older ideologies guiding how they rebuild the world from the scraps of older civilisations. Which way was it to utopia again? As a young girl, Jude was adopted by a billionaire, who later died in a helicopter crash. Jude's sister, Celeste, inherited the family fortune and invested it in space station project Endeavour, in which self-appointed chosen ones were given a seat on board this arc-like saviour, orbiting the Earth in a chemically induced torpor to 'sleep through the worst'. The second sections of Salvage are narrated by Celeste, on board Endeavour, shuffling at intervals down corridors, knocking into other boutique cosmonauts, looking for her sister. They soon suspect they've been abandoned or tricked, and strange occurrences and malfunctions do nothing to ease the nerves. In the third section, Jude and Celeste are together, before the apocalypse. They exist in a fortified complex called Sovereign House, basically a military bunker sequestered from the suffering and ruin experienced by everyone else. In these passages, we see Celeste persuaded by the mad billionaire looking for investors into his space station project, while Jude becomes disenchanted with her sister's myopic privilege.
