Nick Fuller Googins

Being a fan of climate fiction I got this as soon as it was published. I even read the sample chapters because I was so excited about this premise: a family drama set in a world post-transition. Finally a cli-fi novel that doesn’t speak only about the complete downfall of humanity and offers some hope. The family in question consists of two transition heroes and their daughter born in this new world. The conflict comes from the parents’ relationship and their different stances on how to tackle the climate crisis. One of the parents is more revolutionary, while the other is more moderate. I really liked the way book explores those two viewpoints. Just for that reason I give this book 4 stars, as it opens many good questions for discussion and would be great for book clubs.

I had an Audible credit, so I gave a chance to the audio book first. The narration was good and engaging, but especially in the audio version I immediately caught what I didn’t like about this novel. Even though there are three PoVs in the book, it felt very YA to me, not only the parts narrated by the teenager. At 30% I switched to an ebook.

Larch was my favorite character and I enjoyed his parts the best, but even those read very clean and YA-like. Kristina was a very unlikeable character, and I felt like she was a character who was conceived with a lot of stereotypes about immigrants etc. There were also some cringey references, mama Greta etc. I guess what I’m trying to say is that for a book with so much vision it lacked a little maturity for me. 3.5 stars.… (meer)

I don't know if this is a YA book but it certainly could be read that way. Set in the not impossibly distant future, 15 year old Emi was conceived on the day the world recorded net-zero emissions for the first time. A project she is working on for school provides the background readers need for understanding how the world she is living in (Greenland, post climate breakdown) came to be. The rest of the time Emi, a very plausible teenager, is reacting to how climate politics are affecting her own family and future. Emi has choices to make and we all need to know that action on climate change can never stop.… (meer)

The Great Transition is the climate science fiction we needed. It takes place in the near future on a dual timeline, the earliest is during the years of struggle after the melting ice sheets, droughts, and wildfires have made large parts of the world uninhabitable, the other is a generation later, after humans have reached net zero emissions, a day that is marked by annual celebrations of “The Great Transition.”

The narrators are Larch, one of the heroes of The Great Transition, whose work building barriers to save New York City and fighting forest fires was documented for reality television. His wife, Kristina, was a climate refugee with her family, forced into internment camps where they were abused by racist guards and underfed and ill-housed. Those who were willing to do the most dangerous and difficult reclamation and forest-fighting work were allowed to work for their release. Their work brought the two of them together fighting fires in the Yosemite area where they fell in love.

In the later timeline, they live in Nuuk, Greenland. Their daughter Emi is in high school, Larch is chef for a sports team, and Kristina still volunteers annually to spend time on extraction duty, going to the devastated areas to extract energy and salvage what they can of the environment. While Kristina is gone for extraction, Larch and Emi attend the Great Transition celebration, an event Kristina opposed ideologically. Kristina calls Larch and tells them to leave, immediately. Before they can, a bomb explodes. Across the world, the authors of climate destruction are being assassinated. How did Kristina know?

While never articulating their suspicions, Larch and Emi search for Kristina who is not answering her screen (cell phone) and mysterious people are looking for her. They head to New York City, a largely depopulated city that is a central extraction area.

The Great Transition is the kind of hopeful climate fiction we need today. So many climate activists present the climate crisis as an extinction event, prompting despair and a nihilistic acceptance of what’s to come. It’s also unlikely. What is more likely is the future of The Great Transition where many die in weather events triggered by climate change or of privation in refugee camps. A significant remnant of people remain to build a new society in the higher latitudes. In this future, people embrace a more egalitarian communitarian society though many of the climate criminals remain alive and trying to claw back into power. It could have easily gone toward an authoritarian oligarchy, a possibility averted in a confrontation in New York City during the reclamation efforts.

While this future is richly imagined and quite possible, this is not just a climate warning novel. It wrestles with family dynamics, what makes a good parent, what makes a marriage and is love enough to withstand other pressures such as fundamentally conflicting values. Another theme is they ethics of terrorism and assassination when dealing with people whose cupidity destroyed the environment and who itch for the power to do it again. A third important theme is the need for vigilance even when you think things are going well. In a way, this mirrors our national complacency about our democracy and how very real the threat is. These ideas add so much more depth to The Great Transition that one should not just classify it as climate fiction.

I am so grateful to read about a more likely dystopian future that is, in its essentials, hopeful. Humans survive, they work to save the planet, they achieve zero emissions. Right now, a majority of young people in the world think we are doomed. That’s not good. Climate doomerism is less likely to inspire efforts to change our course than optimism. We need more optimism to inspire realistic efforts to change our trajectory toward one of a communitarian environmentalism.

I received an e-galley of The Great Transition from the publisher through Edelweiss.

The Great Transition at Simon & Schuster
Nick Fuller Googins author site
Against Doomerism: A VOX project

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