RHETT DAVIS Arborescence. Reviewed by Robert Goodman

The new novel from the award-winning author of Hovering asks big questions about the environment, AI, and what it means to be human.

Rhett Davis burst onto the Australian literary scene in 2020 with the Victorian Premier’s Unpublished Manuscript Award for his book Hovering, which went on to win the Aurealis Award when it was published in 2022. Hovering was a mind-bending piece of speculative fiction in which a city much like Melbourne was literally shifting under people’s feet, and managed to dig into questions around the nature of art and urban Australia. Davis’s new book, Arborescence, manages a similar feat but on a global scale.

Arborescence focusses on a couple, Bren and Caelyn. Bren works for a strange online company called Queue:

I don’t know much about the company I work for … They don’t have a physical address and I’ve never met anyone in person. I’m a Queue Liaison. I log in to the Queue every weekday. It grows and grows like a tree, and my job is to lop off as many branches as I can … I rarely know the context. Who is this for and what is this for? But I trim the Queue, I get paid on time, and every few weeks my manager sends me messages like, With this kind of velocity you’ll be doing my job in no time.

Whatever it is we’re doing, there’s little humanity in it.

Caelyn, meanwhile, floats from job to job until one day she hears about what her friends are calling a ‘tree cult’ and goes with Bren to investigate:

She points to a hill not far away, where around thirty people stand quietly, arms at their sides, several metres apart from each other. They don’t move. It is as silent now as it has been the entire journey …

‘Is it a protest?’ I whisper …

‘They’re trying to become trees, Bren.’

We stare at the people a little while longer. There’s no movement at all, just the wind blowing their hair. I’m not sure how they stay still for so long. I can’t hold a yoga pose for more than five seconds.

Caelyn and Bren are told that the people are trying to become trees. They do not believe it but later, Caelyn witnesses a transformation and becomes convinced that something new is happening in the world. She goes back to university to study the phenomenon but is met with resistance from the scientific establishment. However, as the evidence grows internationally, Caelyn becomes a global expert on arborescence – a term she coined for the process of people turning into trees – a success that puts a strain on her relationship with Bren.

The idea of people becoming trees is initially treated as a kind of subdued body horror. People stand and eventually become rooted to the ground, at which point they quickly become a tree that is the age that they are at the time. This is not portrayed as a simple or pain-free process. But over the course of the novel it becomes something else. Arborescence is the idea of switching off taken to an extreme – there is also a meditative quality to this decision. It is also a way of doing something practical to address environmental degradation by literally becoming part of the environment. The act itself and its consequences are treated with a pathos that is epitomised by Bren’s personal journey.

It is easy to slot Arboresence into the growing field of post-apocalyptic literature. There are plenty of weird apocalypses out there – mushrooms (The Last of Us), sound waves (The Quiet), blind aliens (The Quiet Place), rage viruses (28 Days Later) – so this is probably not the strangest. But it is possibly the quietest. This is not necessarily about the environment taking revenge on humans but rather the re-establishment of some sort of balance between humanity and nature. Davis is alive to this aspect of his storytelling but does not let humanity off the hook:

Things don’t work as well as they could. Electricity is inconsistent and the internet is subdued. People talk about us being in the midst of an apocalypse, just like all those dystopian stories predicted. But it’s not apocalyptic. People are still good to each other, mostly. It’s more like a slow decline … It’s hard, I think, to know that you are the problem. That to fix it you need to excise yourself. You still want to be part of something. You still want to exist. And yet in merely existing you destroy. You are the problem.

But as with Hovering, Davis has a lot more to say than just this. The story of Bren’s job turns into a weird satire on internet startups and artificial intelligence. It begins with a conversation between Bren and his brother Travis:

Travis … says he’s heard that in some companies alternative intelligences have hired human actors to play them at social events … ‘Because, you know, bots are employees now. With salaries and everything. But even though they’re exempt from going to social events because they aren’t physical entities, they believe that social events are how humans get ahead in the workplace. And so there’s this whole black market of people being paid to be a real-life avatar of the AI. All these out-of-work actors with earpieces doing whatever these bots tell them.’

Davis spins this idea out in a number of bizarre and often amusing directions. But in the end this is all of a piece as he explores a different aspect of the question of what it means to be human and to exist in the world.

There is a plot thread in which Bren recounts issues of a comic called Voidstar that is based on classic science fiction but it is also weirder than that, with the main character taking a completely different form in each story. This in turn leads to a consideration of the narrative form and its relevance to our lives:

There’s always the seed of an arc, sometimes more than one, planted at the start of a story … That shot of a gun, that’s important. Oh she put that in her pocket. That’ll be important … But we start applying those shapes to our own lives, get disappointed when the romance falters, when the dreams shatter, when the paper in the back pocket turns out to be just a piece of blank paper and not the answer to the riddle of the ancient zombie vampire dragon tomb. We live normal, vibrant lives, but we wish there were arcs, we wish we were someone else. We wish we were heroes. But there are no arcs. There are no story beats. We hurtle through space, alive. Why isn’t that enough?

Arborescence is another triumph of Australian speculative fiction. Centred around a believable couple in a believable relationship, Davis builds out his weird premises slowly, bringing the reader along into a shocking but somehow believable alternate future. And he uses this groundwork, in beautifully deployed prose, as a lens through which to explore deep, global questions about the environment and human autonomy in the digital age as well as very personal issues related to family and relationships and grief and loss.

Hovering was one of my favourite books of 2022, and a book I continue to recommend. And while it is only just past halfway through the year, I predict Arborescence will have a similar place in this year’s list.

Rhett Davis Arborescence Hachette 2025 PB $32.99

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 was a judge of the Ned Kelly Awards for many years and reviews for a number of other publications – see his website: www.pilebythebed.com

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Tags: Australian fiction, Australian writers, environment, Hovering, post-apocalyptic literature, Rhett | Davis, speculative fiction