Doggerland

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First pic - the dogs impatiently waiting in their cage to be allowed to explore their temporary home. There’s mention of flood defences and enough other references to make it clear that this is a world approaching an apocalypse, if it’s not already effectively had one. Emmi Itaranta’s The Memory of Water (2014) explores a similar theme about the transience of human life set against the near eternal endurance of water that we shape and borrow but never master. example of that rapidly expanding subgenre of speculative fiction then, joining the likes of Doggerland and Kings of a Dead World in the cli-fi camp. Ben Smith’s powerful debut novel takes us offshore into a polluted future and to a singular seascape – a vast wind farm of more than 6,000 turbines somewhere out on Dogger Bank.

As an academic, he specialises in environmental literature focusing particularly on oceans, waste and the ‘Anthropocene’, relating to human impact on geology. It was unfortunate that his father had chosen to renege on his contract…as the only next of kin this duty fell to him. Whilst the reader is made to share the ennui of the Boy and his mentor, Smith turns his story into a gripping one by making the most of the scant plot elements. They carry out their never-ending work, scoured by wind and salt, as the waves roll, dragging strange shoals of flotsam through the turbine fields. It turned out that the coffee machine could be made to dispense water too, which the boy only found out after his hands shook so much that he pushed the wrong button.Nikoleris et all expressed a hopeful conclusion that “Through identification with the protagonists in literary fiction, climate change moves from being distant and abstract to close and personal…and [can] create space for personal reflections. Set in the future on a slowly breaking down wind farm maintained as much as possible by the Old Man and the Boy whose names remain a mystery for most of the book.

Like Smith’s Doggerland, Rym Kechacha’s Dark River (2020) draws links between the neolithic past and the climate changed and challenged near-future, although Smith’s interludes into the past are more brief observational notes unlike Kechacha’s protagonist driven narrative. We’re a collaborative review site run by volunteers who love Fantasy, Sci-fi, Horror, and everything in-between.Much like The Wall, John Lanchester’s latest, this is a timely offshore story that investigates the ramifications of England’s isolationism. Can it be that this young man really remembers so little of his past and has so little curiosity about the wider world? The vast blades of the turbines flail, feather and align themselves to the prevailing winds – some so leviathan that their interiors are “like staring up a mineshaft that had been cut out of the sky”. Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH). The Road meets Waiting for Godot: powerful, unforgettable, unique’ Melissa Harrison, author of At Hawthorn Time.

Provided they stay at their posts, neither their work, nor the failing output of the wind farm seems to attract any attention – or even communication – from the Company that not so much employs them as owns them. As time ebbs away so does the possibility of finding Luna alive, while Karen faces seemingly impossible choices, ones that could spell life or death, both for herself and others. In a recent article I quoted from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale about societal changes happening so slowly they are almost imperceptible, or as she put it far more vividly: “in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it. So Smith’s compelling central narrative of the relationship between the Boy and the Old Man, mediated by a few interventions and asides from the Pilot, depicts a future ruined by corporate control, rising sea levels, plastic pollution and trade which prioritises greed over need. There is the Old Man who shares Jem’s duties and home on a rusting accommodation rig for maintenance workers in the centre of the wind farm.On our site, you can find not only book reviews but author interviews, cover reveals, excerpts from books, acquisition announcements, guest posts by your favourite authors, and so much more. In a comic opening sequence, the boy hauls up his fishing line to find he’s caught the clichéd boot. For much of the book, the story centres on 'the boy' and 'the old man' who spend their lives maintaining a vast endless and deteriorating wind farm somewhere in the north sea.