The new novel from the author of Dyschronia and The Airways is climate fiction focussed on human adaptability.

There is plenty going on in Australia at the moment that reflects the impacts of climate change. Massive bushfires, years-long droughts, tropical cyclones coming south, regular once-in-a-hundred-year flood events. So it is little wonder that Australian authors have turned their attention to this issue – not just in novels that project into the future, but in the mainstream. Australian speculative fiction author Jennifer Mills has been to this well before with her dizzying 2018 novel Dyschronia, a cautionary parable about environmental damage and our inability to reckon with it. Her new novel, Salvage, is a more down-the-line climate fiction but is no less effective.

The plot plays out across four main timeframes that are all slowly brought together. In the opening, Jude is rushing to confront the Alliance, who have taken her sister, and is unwittingly joined by a group of friends who refuse to let her go alone. Three months before this, a body in a stasis capsule is salvaged from the waters off the coast of the Freelands, and Jude is dragooned into helping with the comatose survivor. The capsule has possibly come from a space station and the survivor may well be Jude’s sister Celeste, but she does not reveal that to anyone.

Celeste’s trippy time on the station is told in short, impressionistic chapters.

She hurries to her own room. Three doors down. No, night means nothing up here. Up and down, here and there, in and out, round and round, none of it means anything. Still, we must go on. She bends to the hatch, and language scatters at her feet. Where she’s going she won’t need to speak. Feet first into the padded room, she lands on the soft bed, crosses her legs and lifts her face to watch the hatch slide closed overhead. The little lights beside her bed flicker, waiting. They will dim when she does.

In the past, a young Jude is adopted by the wealthy Prince family and finds herself with an older sister who inherits the company and falls under the sway of a millionaire influencer. It is a life that she is deeply uncomfortable with:

The meal is served by a stern young woman from the agency they’ve been using since Celeste let the regular staff go. Absurdly, there are shellfish: linguine alle vongole, hundreds of kilometres from the sea. The oceans are boiling, fish stocks collapsing, millions of people starving because of it. Jude reads the newsfeeds. She knows Celeste does too, though they don’t discuss it much …

‘They grew in tanks,’ [Celeste] says, ‘no heavy metals. I made sure they were tested.’

‘It’s not that,’ Jude says.

Mills plays these threads slowly to dole out revelations and build tension but also to build out the future world that she has envisioned. The refreshing aspect of Salvage is that the future world Mills presents is not an environmental hellscape. Sure, there are dystopian elements and changed political circumstances, and certainly the world has changed, but it is not unliveable. Through the historical sections, Mills touches on potentially catastrophic environmental changes in Australia, but also how people responded to those changes – the closing of borders, those wealthy enough to do so retreating to the sea or into space.

An aspect that Mills explores in detail is the different responses to climate change depending on wealth and privilege. Jude is brought up in the shadow of an environmental catastrophe but wants for nothing. She sees the way in which the wealthy continue to exploit the system while looking for an escape, and turns her back on that world. But the world that emerges is very similar, and even in the supposed utopia of the Freelands, which opens itself to refugees, Jude finds tribalism and a split of haves and have nots.

Jude is a fascinating and complex central character. In the Freelands she has morphed again, finding work as a driver, helping to resettle new refugees:

Some people – mostly Ali – had accused her of nostalgia for the old polluting engine. And she was attached to the truck: it was a survivor, a twentieth-century workhorse, older than she was … There were few vehicles like it, and nothing else in Northport that could handle so much heavy lifting. It made Jude useful.

Jude is a woman who has had to reinvent herself numerous times in the course of her life and is always looking for an exit when things get tough. Her journey in Salvage, right from the first page when people jump into her truck to come on a quest with her, is to come to terms with the fact that she has become part of a community. She does her part and, as a result, that community will support her, despite the fact she has kept them in the dark.

There has been a lot of Australian climate fiction in the past year. Tim Winton explored similar territory but with a much more nihilistic framing in his novel Juice. In Wild Dark Shore, Charlotte McConaghy stayed a little closer to the present, explored a potential climate future but with just a little bit more hope. And in Landfall, James Bradley presented a hot, flood- and storm-prone future Sydney and also considered the plight of climate refugees. It seems every second rural crime novel now ends with a climate-fuelled bushfire (just recently we’ve had Jane Caro’s Lyrebird, James Delargy’s Into the Flames and Shelley Burr’s Vanish).

Salvage takes a much more nuanced and believable view of the future. In this world, while the old world has gone, everything can be repurposed. The community adapts and learns to live with the change:

The lower half of the building stepped down into the waves. Those were the best tables once: out in the open, close to the water. Wealthy tourists would have eaten seafood there, the crisp scent of mountain wine lifted by the sea breeze. Now the terrace was a set of shallow pools where children liked to swim, protected by the crumbling wall.

And Mills does not evangelise or come down firmly on a right or wrong way to do this. Even the Alliance, when it is encountered, is not the scary authoritarian regime that a more didactic writer might have delivered. It is merely a more controlled socio-political response to scarcity and climate uncertainty than the Freelands.

From a climate fiction perspective, Salvage is up there with the best of the recent crop of novels. Mills is clear-eyed about the challenges facing the globe but treats the changing climate as something humans are going to have to (and will) deal with. She is particularly interested in the impacts of wealth disparity but asks the very pertinent question of whether money, in the end, is going to help. For Mills the answer lies in community, in people helping each other even when, possibly, they don’t have to. It is a positive spin on an existential challenge and dealt with through poetically rendered fiction and the life and relationships of a complex, flawed protagonist.

Jennifer Mills Salvage Picador 2025 PB 448pp $34.99

Robert Goodman is an institutionalised public servant and obsessive reader, who won a science fiction short-story competition very early in his career but has found reviewing a better outlet for his skills. He is a judge of the Ned Kelly Awards and reviews for a number of other publications – see his website: www.pilebythebed.com

You can buy Salvage from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW.

You can also check if it is available from Newtown Library.

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Tags: adaptability, Australian fiction, Australian writers, climate change, climate fiction, Jennifer | MIlls, speculative fiction


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