AustLit

'While we are all currently distracted by the threat of Covid-19, the environmental crisis remains front and centre in James Bradley’s new novel, Ghost Species. Earth is “past the tipping point” and entering a phase called “the Melt”. Sea ice has vanished, even a northern summer lasts for six months, the ground is sinking as permafrost melts, forests are on fire and two-thirds of all wildlife has become extinct. The situation is becoming desperate. Enter a renegade, megalomaniacal tech billionaire, Davis Hucken – described by one character as “Doctor fucking Evil in a hoodie” – who believes the answer to the world’s problems lies in resurrecting extinct species. Having already revived mammoths and thylacines, he hires two young-gun Australian scientists, flies them into a luxurious facility in the Tasmanian wilderness and tasks them with reanimating Homo neanderthalensis.' (Introduction)

'James Bradley’s Ghost Species arrives at a time when fiction seems outpaced by the speed with which we humans are changing the planet. Alarmingly, such writerly speculation has been realised during Australia’s tragic summer, when the future finally bore down on us. And there are few writers of climate fiction – or ‘cli-fi’, the term coined by activist blogger Dan Bloom and popularised in a tweet by Margaret Atwood – who so delicately straddle the conceptual divide between present and future as Bradley.' (Introduction)

'In his new novel, Ghost Species, James Bradley walks the tightrope between ideas and entertainment, revisiting a theme that has dominated his writing of late: the possibility of Earth’s environmental ruin.' (Introduction)