Children of Tomorrow


 
 
 Endorsements for Children of Tomorrow
 Intimate and profound, Children of Tomorrow is a love song for a burning planet.
 JAMES BRADLEY
 With echoes of Kim Stanley Robinson, James Bradley and Richard Powers, JR Burgmann provides a lyrical catalogue of the terrifying crises to come. If you’re waiting for a hero to save us, Children of Tomorrow is a timely reminder that climate change is caused by a complex network of people, and that collective action and diverse approaches are our only way out of this.
 JANE RAWSON
 In Children of Tomorrow, JR Burgmann delivers a pre-emptive elegy to our world as it spins through the 21st century into what could conceivably be the human race’s endgame. The tension increases chapter by chapter much like the carbon dioxide in the air, preventing characters, and us, from breathing easily. And yet, as resources dwindle, stability vanishes and long-held values and viewpoints fall by the wayside, the relationships and networks that bind us to each other in our inevitably shared destiny hold, just about, though not without cost, and certainly not without grief. This novel doesn’t pull its punches but does, ultimately, nail its colours to the mast of that most persistent and valuable of all human commodities: hope.
 PAUL DALGARNO
 Children of Tomorrow is a vivid and disturbing vision of what could happen in this coming century if we don’t respond well to the current polycrisis. It’s not a matter of end-of-everything apocalypse, but rather a continuous epic struggle to cope with wild change. Burgmann shows how the novel can be put back to its proper use describing history itself, by way of braided swift stories of people doing the epic work of survival. A novel to remember!
 KIM STANLEY ROBINSON
 
 
 
 
 J.R. Burgmann
 J.R. Burgmann is an emerging writer and critic. He is a graduate of the University of Melbourne and received his PhD in Literary and Cultural Studies from Monash University, where he is based at the Monash Climate Change Communication Research Hub. This debut novel was highly commended in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards 2021 in the category of unpublished manuscripts. In 2022 he was awarded a Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellowship.
 
 
 
 
 
 First published in Australia in 2023
 by Upswell Publishing
 Perth, Western Australia
 upswellpublishing.com
 This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.
 Copyright © 2023 by J.R. Burgmann
 The moral right of the author has been asserted.
 ISBN: 978-0-645-53695-9
 eISBN: 978-1-7438229-1-3
 
 Cover artwork: Minaxi May, 2019
 Cover design by Chil3, Fremantle
 Typeset by Lasertype
 Upswell Publishing is assisted by the State of Western Australia through its funding program for arts and culture.
 
 
 
 
 For Norah and Hadley.
 May this world not be your own.
 
 
 ‘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 mobilized 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.’
 —Richard Powers, The Overstory
 
 
 Contents
 Century’s Beginning
 1 Extinction
 2 Campus
 3 Bleach
 4 Committed
 5 Benji
 6 Storm
 Century’s Middle
 7 Adrift
 8 The Pier
 9 Strike
 10 16chan
 11 Weatheralls
 12 Tipping Points
 Century’s End
 13 The Drifter
 14 Meltwater
 15 Seastead
 16 Eden
 17 The Great Rewilding
 18 Third Rock from the Fire
 
 
 There used to be so much colour in the world.
 It burst from beneath your feet and filled the Earth and its oceans and its skies. It was everywhere, but we did not see the miracle. You could hold infinite marvels in your hand—the way Arne does a fading gumleaf now—and peer into their nature.
 Sitting on his haunches, spinning the leaf by its frail stem, he considers the empty shoreline. He rises to his feet and hobbles down to the water, wading in up to his knees, which click and creak with every movement. He scans the quiet cove, and beyond—the empty, darkening horizon.
 He moves further out, deeper.
 He places the gumleaf on the water and, after a time, lets it go. It floats like a magic carpet, rising and falling on the sea, drifting away.
 He waits.
 Time flickers, and at some darker hour he gives up, hauling his failing body back to the land, heaving painfully as he climbs the crumbling beach and reaches the gumrest, a place where he ought to sit 
 Century’s Beginning
 
 
 1
 Extinction
 Carbon dioxide parts per million: 402.5
 Sunset on the mountaintop and the lake goldens, shimmering purple out to its bank.
 ‘To be more precise,’ Thomas begins to his student, ‘it’s a tarn. The formation here is glacial.’
 Arne Bakke knows the sound of this word, but not, until now, its meaning. He nods, listening—or, at the very least, appearing to listen. That is very important: appearing to listen to your supervisor. ‘Academics love it,’ Wally, his closest friend, had quipped over drinks one night, back when Arne was first weighing up whether or not to accept the doctoral scholarship—a meagre sum—he’d been offered. ‘They are lonely, increasingly irrelevant creatures. On the verge of extinction. No one gives a fuck about research,’ Wally had continued, before emphatically gulping his beer, sacrificing his Quebecois beard to a snowy cloud of foam. ‘Just remember that, Arnie. The world will not care about what you do. It won’t even pretend to listen. At the very least pretend to listen to your supervisor.’ But now, as