Bradley - Clade

PRAISE FOR CLADE

Clade is a brilliant, unsettling and timely novel: a true text of the Anthropocene in its subtle shuttlings between lives, epochs and eras, and its knitting together of the planets places. Like Barbara Kingsolvers Flight Behaviour, its great subjects are deep time, swift change, and the eeriness of everyday life. Reading Clade leaves us, in Timothy Mortons phrase, strange strangers to ourselves; and makes the Earth seem an odder, older, more vulnerable home.
Robert Macfarlane, author of The Old Ways

A beautifully written meditation on climate collapse, concentrating on three generations of an Australian family. Bradley skilfully evokes the particularity of lived experience, and the novel is full of vivid little moments, although its real triumph is in setting these in their larger context: a world wrecked by storms and floods, changes in vegetation and the collapse of bird and bee populations... Bradleys short, intense novel is as much a hymn to hope as it is a warning. New Scientist

[An] elegantly bleak vision of a climate-change future... urgent, powerful stuff.
The Guardian

[A]mong the most literate and humane contributions to that slowly emerging tradition of what is sometimes called slow apocalypse fiction... a near-epic of loss, remembrance, and steadily diminishing hope.Locus

A lyrical, strangely uplifting book that will stay with you long after youve turned the final page. Gareth L. Powell, author of Ack Ack Macaque

[T]here is no one like [Bradley] in the imagining of the imminent end time of the way we live now. Sydney Review of Books

That rarest of novels: one that stares down its harrowing beginning to find a sense of peace and even of wonder, while being true to itself. All the way through, the prose is achingly beautiful. Bradleys a magnificent writer and its all on display here: sentences and images float, poetic and sharp as crystal. The Saturday Paper

This is the unstinting dreaming and devoted craft-work of a deeply serious, marvelously accomplished artist taking on the absolutely essential.
Thomas Farber, author of The Beholder

What is really important in this novel is not these brilliantly rendered future disaster scenarios, but the way epic events are juxtaposed with very human stories... There is a beauty in the way Bradley depicts sadness with such truthfulness and honesty. And in very important ways Clade is, in fact, a hopeful novel. It is a book that depicts human life and love as a shining star in the great dark abyss of time... Clade is not a novel about what is lost, but what we can never lose. SFFWorld

A melodic, intense rendering... sharp, inventive and ultimately hopeful. Herald Sun

CLADE

JAMES

BRADLEY

TITAN BOOKS

Clade

Print edition ISBN: 9781785654145
E-book edition ISBN: 9781785655487

Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd.
144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP
www.titanbooks.com

First Titan edition: September 2017
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Copyright 2015, 2017 James Bradley. All rights reserved.

Cover design by Adam Laszczuk Penguin Group (Australia)
Cover photographs; Bees: Deyan Georgiev/500px; Hive: Getty Images

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

for Annabelle and Lila

Everything flows and nothing abides

HERACLITUS

CONTENTS

SOLSTICE

As Adam steps outside the cold strikes him like a physical thing, the shock still startling after all these weeks. For a moment he pauses, looking out across the bay, the crowding floes of ice. Then, adjusting his goggles, he descends the short ramp to the scoured stone upon which the building stands and strikes out towards the headland.

It is quiet out here today, the only sounds that disturb the silence those of the wind, the occasional squalling cry of the birds. Down by the water an elephant seal lies on the rocks, its vast bulk mottled and sluglike; around it tracks of human activity scar the snow like rust, turning it grey and red and dirty.

In the building behind him the other personnel are celebrating the solstice, an occurrence those stationed here have long observed with an extended meal and drinking and dancing. The event is a way of marking not just the date but the peculiar rhythms of life at the base, the annual cycle which means that from here on the arrivals will slow and departures increase, until only the skeleton crew who maintain the facility through the months of cold and darkness remain.

Passing the Klein-blue boxes of the power distribution units he finds himself wondering again about this tradition. Humans have observed the solstice for tens of thousands of years, but are those festivities truly celebrations, or something more ambivalent? Symbols of loss, of the running down of things? After all, the solstice also marks the beginning of summers end, the first intimation of the years long retreat back into the dark.

Beyond the last building the land opens out, the dirty grey of rock and mud and melting snow giving way to the white glare of ice. The wind is stronger here, and even colder, but he does not slow or turn aside; instead, closing his hand around the phone in his pocket, he shrugs his neck deeper into his collar and quickens his step.

Back in Sydney it is just after one, and Ellie will be in the waiting room of the clinic. He can picture her seated in the corner, on the couch she always chooses, trying to concentrate on her tablet or flicking through a magazine. Normally she would not be there alone, but before he left they agreed she would continue the treatment while he was away, a decision he tried not to take as a sign his presence was no longer really needed.

Todays appointment is the last for this cycle and in many ways the only one that matters. For while over the past fortnight Ellie has been to the clinic almost daily, initially for hormone injections, then later for the extraction of the ova and the implantation of the fertilised embryos, it is today that they will take her blood one last time and tell her whether the process has succeeded.

They have been here before, of course. Once a month for the best part of two years the two of them have sat in that office and watched the gynaecologist purse her lips and assume the mask of bland concern she uses to deliver the bad news; once a month for the best part of two years he has reached out to take Ellies hand as she nods and thanks the gynaecologist, the only sign of her distress the stiffness with which she holds herself, the care with which she finds her way to her feet and back to the waiting room.