This is a short-story collection with a mission. Inspired by a lecture about the impact of climate change on Scotland’s wildlife, editor Gregory Norminton challenged a number of writers, including Alasdair Gray, Joanne Harris, AL Kennedy and Toby Litt, to find a literary response to the problem. The 21 stories that make up this collection imagine the full range of our possible futures, from a world in which nobody can go outside on rainy days to one in which an ordinary family begins to reduce its carbon footprint.
Consistently engaging and inventive, its highlight is an exploration of the relationship between mankind and nature, told in comic-book format. As one character points out, we are “limpets . . . clinging to our familiar limpetty rock”, yet, as Norminton reminds us, we have a “collective duty to imagine what we fear to look at”. With all author royalties going to the Stop Climate Chaos Coalition, make this book your way of tackling that fear.
