'A provocative, urgent novel about time, family and how a changing planet might change our lives, from James Bradley, acclaimed author of The Resurrectionist and editor of The Penguin Book of the Ocean.
'Compelling, challenging and resilient, over ten beautifully contained chapters, Clade canvasses three generations from the very near future to late this century. Central to the novel is the family of Adam, a scientist, and his wife Ellie, an artist. Clade opens with them wanting a child and Adam in a quandary about the wisdom of this. Their daughter proves to be an elusive little girl and then a troubled teenager, and by now cracks have appeared in her parents' marriage. Their grandson is in turn a troubled boy, but when his character reappears as an adult he's an astronomer, one set to discover something astounding in the universe. With great skill James Bradley shifts us subtly forward through the decades, through disasters and plagues, miraculous small moments and acts of great courage. Elegant, evocative, understated and thought-provoking, it is the work of a writer in command of the major themes of our time.' (Publication summary)
'Australians are nervous about AI. Efforts are underway to put their minds at ease: advisory committees, consultations and regulations. But these actions have tended to be reactive instead of proactive. We need to imagine potential scenarios before they happen.' (Introduction)
'James Bradley's futuristic novel Clade (2015) is not chiefly a story about human disability. It is a novel about climate crisis set across the course of the twenty-first century. But midway through the novel, we are introduced to a seven-year-old boy, Noah, who becomes a key character in the second half of the narrative. Noah is on the spectrum. Autistics decry their portrayal in fiction as aliens, as outsiders, as harbingers of disease and disorder, as beings without agency. As we get to know Noah as a boy, through his teenage years, and later on as an astronomer, his autism is neither denied nor made the defining characteristic of his personhood. Noah is given voice, perspective, and centrality as a rounded character, emerging as someone well suited to a future world reshaped by environmental crises and new social relations. He is not pathologized but socialized across the course of the novel into a world of family, friends, and work. Like his biblical namesake, Noah becomes a survivor in the new environmental and social spaces of the latter part of the twenty-first century.' (Publication abstract)
