Future by Tom Woodman, Rupert Smissen & Aditya Bidikar

I’ve mentioned it before, but every birthday and every XXXmas my lover buys me time travel fiction.

(((I’ll likely mention this again as the baby (who I have had with my long term partner (and occasional collaborator), rather than some new squeeze) has [probably] cemented an already tight relationship. Babies either pull people together or push people apart, right? Or, the worst situation, they do both without doing either properly … I mean people who really need to be apart who refuse to separate “for the kids” … There is nothing crueller, nothing meaner, nothing more inhumane, dehumanising, life destroying and unforgivable [in my opinion] than raising a child to believe that there’s no such thing as love, no such thing as companionship, no such thing as mutual respect and care and romance and contentment… It’s a horrible, horrible, horrible thing to do and it is enraging that even today – when we know how awful this is and when there’s (at least not for now) no terrifying legal or social consequences for separation – it still happens, people still do it, people still propagandise misery as inevitable, misery as normal, misery as standard… It’s hideous, it’s heinous, it’s fucking horrible. Yes. If you cannot raise a child to believe in love and people then you cannot (ethically and practically) raise a child and I hate that we have to pretend that this is a forgivable act. You have to, you have to, you have to be able to live in the life you have. You have to. I am desperately and finally making changes to my life that I should have done years ago and it’s not because of any new revelation or epiphany or breakthrough, it’s just for the mere blunt reason that – my self-esteem as low as it is – my happiness finally matters to someone else [who I don’t perceive as stronger than me]. I can’t be a sad, bitter, miserable loser who hates themself and their life and raise a child with a positive mind and the potential for joy. Probably not. And if it gets me out of this multi-decade funk then it’s a gamble worth making, I suppose.)))

Sorry, yes, so.

Future by Tom Woodman, Rupert Smissen & Aditya Bidikar.

It’s time travel and cancer.

It’s cli-fi, climate fiction, about Murray, a skilled yet dying space pilot required to come out of retirement for one last mission… Murray is one of the few remaining astronauts alive (or at least unincarcerated?), possibly implying that everyone who flew a spaceship before they were all grounded went mad, was executed or succumbed early to cancer due to radiation exposure outside of the atmosphere?

Certainly Murray is nowhere near the end of a standard “natural human lifespan” (she’s under 40, I think, certainly not much past that!), yet she remains the person the scientist who discovers some abandoned NASA tech dumped in the ocean that may permit time travel FROM SPACE turns to because there are no other options…

Her mission is to fly into space, travel to the future, take loads of data readings related to climate change, send the data back to the present (backwards time travel is easy to do with data, hard to do with people), let human scientists and governments respond to the data and sort all the problems out (lol) and then travel further into the future when Earth will be perfect (lol), treatment for late stage cancer will have been sorted (lol), and then live out a full “natural human lifespan” in the distant future and live happily ever after. (The astronaut-pilot’s wife is an engineer and also coming with her to ensure all the time travel works, so she isn’t alone and the possibility of happiness isn’t necessarily impossible.)

Well, obviously, the data points all point to total environmental collapse and the later – dreamed to be perfect – Earth they arrive at is devastated totally, with nothing living left alive, at least not where they land.

All the water appears to be gone.

Where is the water?

Why is it so hot, even at the polar extremities of the Earth?

We (the reader[s]) don’t get an explanation, but I don’t think one is needed.

Humans have fucked the planet, and in the fantasy future of the time between now and the distant future, some of us have fucked it even further and even harder than we’d fucked it before. (Sorry for the coarse language – I think expressing concern about climate change is soon to be made a capital offence in the UK so I should make sure to come back and delete this.)

The futurenauts head to the Svalbard Seed Bank (sorry, “Vault”) hoping for some sign of life, but instead they find a deserted desert wasteland populated only by the skeletons of people, technologies and animals. All that remains is a path leading to a secure, solar-powered complex with a few more skeletons inside, but nothing other than plants that are recoverable.

Is there hope in a future like this?

Possibly there is, possibly the time travel spaceship can be tricked into backwards travel but only if charged up by the intense proximity of the sun’s rays, but is there any point in heading back in time if the only possible future is a short wait for death, for dying, for nothing?

Is there hope?

Should there be hope?

It’s easy to feel hopeless, in the world and in narratives like this.

It’s easy to feel like nothing good is ever going to happen.

It’s easy to worry about meaningless, functionless trite like future health and future money when what we all need to do, what we must must must must must do in order to live, in order to be alive, is to be present. Is to be present in the present. Is to not surround ourselves with horror and tedium and nothingness due to habit, propriety or something even more motiveless than this…

Future was a beautiful, moving, serious piece of climate horror sci-fi.

Visions and nightmares and possibilities collide.

Time travel and climate apocalypse and love and loneliness and regret and hope and all those other important, deeply human, things.

I liked it a lot.

Order direct from the publisher (or from someone?) here.