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A review by one_womanarmy
Expect Me Tomorrow by Christopher Priest
challenging
emotional
informative
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
1.5
After finishing the final pages of Christopher Priest's pandemic-birthed novel, I was left with the same question that puzzled me in the first ten, fifty, and hundred pages of the book - what genre is it? Science fiction? Time travel? Historical fiction? A book about injustice? A clever climate denial scheme?
Expect Me Tomorrow is told across two narrative strands, featuring two sets of identical twins. Adolf and Adler Beck survive a glaciologist father; Adler pursues a career in climate science and Adolf becomes a roaming opera singer and bon vivant. Their lives become entangled with their relatives, another set of twins in 2050 living through accelerating climate intensity in the British Isles. When Chad Ramsey is fired from his police investigation job he retains a mysterious DNA connectivity technology that allows him to access his ancestors for brief moments of their real lives, back in time, and attempt to clear Adolf's name from a supposedly false conviction in the 1870's.
Across this already confusing landscape of twins, time travel, and crime are conflicting climate change theories. Adler Beck believes in the Gulf Stream collapse theory which posits the collapse of the Greenland ice sheet combined with the end of a natural solar cycle will result in an Ice Age incrusting Earth in uninhabitable cold. His modern counterpart's story is told not through science, but lived experience, narrating his days of struggling to find food amid heat waves and sand storms, the encroaching deaths of millions of refugees and the collapse of his town into the sea, the collapse of waste, sanitation, and policing, and the deterioration of his own home and livelihood in real-time.
As Chad (modern) connects to Adler (past) we are wound casually through an increasingly "sure" picture that Adler was correct - climate change will be reversed by the melting of the Greenland ice sheet. Similarly, the past relevatives' names are cleared, dead fathers found, and our modern climate refugees able to move to Norway and take a job with UN at the last moment.... all is well, all ends tidy, and climate change averted, all in one book! If only a single tantalizing ecological event - or in the case of Chad, a phone call from a wealthy benefactor - could so neatly wrap up the anthropological nightmare we have steadily created for ourselves.
The book is driven by a hopeless need for a Hail Mary save. That we be protected from our own worst mistakes, habits, and oversights by omnipotent forces beyond our control.
This small-minded climate change drivel was further mired by dragging passes of irrelevant technological minutiae and long-winded descriptions that advance no plot or character. The consulted nature of attaching several narrative strands together was not well done - Priest botches the possibility of elegantly showing how past and present, science and superstition, truth and mistruth can be reworked and overlaid with one another. Instead, he spends precious pages in tedious descriptions of scenes that go nowhere, pairing this with affectless dialogue and excruciating long scientific passages which were difficult even for someone with my climate science background to digest.
The passages of Chad existing in a 2050 climate scenario were heart-breaking, and the best portion of the novel. The vivid nature of life's everyday details becomes a struggle the reader embodies. Chad and his wife eat, sleep, fix their house, and work - but in an increasingly difficult world, where the house is suffocatingly warm, infrastructure is collapsing, and small daily necessities like batteries hard to come by.
Overall, not a worthy read, though a valiant effort to weave interesting narrative forces and climate fiction potential together.
Expect Me Tomorrow is told across two narrative strands, featuring two sets of identical twins. Adolf and Adler Beck survive a glaciologist father; Adler pursues a career in climate science and Adolf becomes a roaming opera singer and bon vivant. Their lives become entangled with their relatives, another set of twins in 2050 living through accelerating climate intensity in the British Isles. When Chad Ramsey is fired from his police investigation job he retains a mysterious DNA connectivity technology that allows him to access his ancestors for brief moments of their real lives, back in time, and attempt to clear Adolf's name from a supposedly false conviction in the 1870's.
Across this already confusing landscape of twins, time travel, and crime are conflicting climate change theories. Adler Beck believes in the Gulf Stream collapse theory which posits the collapse of the Greenland ice sheet combined with the end of a natural solar cycle will result in an Ice Age incrusting Earth in uninhabitable cold. His modern counterpart's story is told not through science, but lived experience, narrating his days of struggling to find food amid heat waves and sand storms, the encroaching deaths of millions of refugees and the collapse of his town into the sea, the collapse of waste, sanitation, and policing, and the deterioration of his own home and livelihood in real-time.
As Chad (modern) connects to Adler (past) we are wound casually through an increasingly "sure" picture that Adler was correct - climate change will be reversed by the melting of the Greenland ice sheet. Similarly, the past relevatives' names are cleared, dead fathers found, and our modern climate refugees able to move to Norway and take a job with UN at the last moment.... all is well, all ends tidy, and climate change averted, all in one book! If only a single tantalizing ecological event - or in the case of Chad, a phone call from a wealthy benefactor - could so neatly wrap up the anthropological nightmare we have steadily created for ourselves.
The book is driven by a hopeless need for a Hail Mary save. That we be protected from our own worst mistakes, habits, and oversights by omnipotent forces beyond our control.
This small-minded climate change drivel was further mired by dragging passes of irrelevant technological minutiae and long-winded descriptions that advance no plot or character. The consulted nature of attaching several narrative strands together was not well done - Priest botches the possibility of elegantly showing how past and present, science and superstition, truth and mistruth can be reworked and overlaid with one another. Instead, he spends precious pages in tedious descriptions of scenes that go nowhere, pairing this with affectless dialogue and excruciating long scientific passages which were difficult even for someone with my climate science background to digest.
The passages of Chad existing in a 2050 climate scenario were heart-breaking, and the best portion of the novel. The vivid nature of life's everyday details becomes a struggle the reader embodies. Chad and his wife eat, sleep, fix their house, and work - but in an increasingly difficult world, where the house is suffocatingly warm, infrastructure is collapsing, and small daily necessities like batteries hard to come by.
Overall, not a worthy read, though a valiant effort to weave interesting narrative forces and climate fiction potential together.