'When scientist Kate Larkin joins a secretive project to re-engineer the climate by resurrecting extinct species she becomes enmeshed in another, even more clandestine program to recreate our long-lost relatives, the Neanderthals. But when the first of the children, a girl called Eve, is born, Kate cannot bear the thought her growing up in a laboratory, and so elects to abduct her, and raise her alone.
'Set against the backdrop of hastening climate catastrophe, Ghost Species is an exquisitely beautiful and deeply affecting exploration of connection and loss in an age of planetary trauma. For as Eve grows to adulthood she and Kate must face the question of who and what she is. Is she natural or artificial? Human or non-human? And perhaps most importantly, as civilisation unravels around them, is Eve the ghost species, or are we?
'James Bradley embeds Ghost Species with his deep and humane understanding of the natural world and a profound optimism, that together we can survive and thrive.' (Publication summary)
'In this essay, I am analysing James Bradley's 2020 novel Ghost Species for its generic make-up and the ways in which this interacts with questions of gender. As I will argue, Ghost Species is a multi-genre mix of science fiction, climate fiction, domestic novel, and coming-of-age story and thus combines realist with speculative fiction. It defies classic genre conventions because of its female focalizers and their representation within the scientific community and society more generally. As a result, a newclear family is constructed, with the NeaHuman and her coming of age in the centre. By bringing together the different genres and their gendered presumptions, Ghost Species challenges traditional ideas of mothers as caretakers as well as of the coming of age as a female.'
Source: ProQuest.
'This chapter investigates the response of the Australian novel to the Anthropocene. It considers ways in which new, speculative fictions have sought to represent deep time and planetary interconnection, and interrogates how this connects to long-standing settler-colonial relations to land. It considers such writers as James Bradley, George Turner, and Tara June Winch, and emphasizes the region of Western Australia as a place of particular environmental urgency.' (Publication abstract)
'While we are all currently distracted by the threat of Covid-19, the environmental crisis remains front and centre in James Bradley’s new novel, Ghost Species. Earth is “past the tipping point” and entering a phase called “the Melt”. Sea ice has vanished, even a northern summer lasts for six months, the ground is sinking as permafrost melts, forests are on fire and two-thirds of all wildlife has become extinct. The situation is becoming desperate. Enter a renegade, megalomaniacal tech billionaire, Davis Hucken – described by one character as “Doctor fucking Evil in a hoodie” – who believes the answer to the world’s problems lies in resurrecting extinct species. Having already revived mammoths and thylacines, he hires two young-gun Australian scientists, flies them into a luxurious facility in the Tasmanian wilderness and tasks them with reanimating Homo neanderthalensis.' (Introduction)
'James Bradley’s Ghost Species arrives at a time when fiction seems outpaced by the speed with which we humans are changing the planet. Alarmingly, such writerly speculation has been realised during Australia’s tragic summer, when the future finally bore down on us. And there are few writers of climate fiction – or ‘cli-fi’, the term coined by activist blogger Dan Bloom and popularised in a tweet by Margaret Atwood – who so delicately straddle the conceptual divide between present and future as Bradley.' (Introduction)
'In his new novel, Ghost Species, James Bradley walks the tightrope between ideas and entertainment, revisiting a theme that has dominated his writing of late: the possibility of Earth’s environmental ruin.' (Introduction)
'How do writers address climate catastrophe, and where do they place climate within their fictional narratives? Two writers, Anne Charnock and James Bradley, face up to this challenge in novels published in 2020. They compare notes about their different approaches in this exchange of emails.' (Introduction)
At Home with James Bradley
Astrid Edwards
(interviewer),
2020
19327252
2020
single work
podcast
interview
'James Bradley's work explores the environment and climate, as well as time - our past, our present, and our possible futures.
'He is the author of five novels - Ghost Species, Wrack, The Deep Field, The Resurrectionist and Clade. His works are highly awarded, and he has been shortlisted for both the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the Christina Steed Prize for Fiction.'
Source: The Garret.
