Paul McAuley is Tim’s favourite author and I completely understand why. I am surprised McAuley isn’t more widely known, as he is in my experience consistently excellent, creating thoughtful, hard science fiction with great characters and exciting stories.

His 2017 novel Austral imagines a world where the climate catastrophe has happened, the worst-case scenarios came to pass, and the surviving humans have learned little to nothing from it, continuing to put the needs of rich people and corporations before other concerns. It’s depressing in its believability.

A century after the climate catastrophe, Antarctica is now a country with elected politicians and cities to house all the people who work in the plethora of mines the continent is now home to. The first wave of people to move to Antarctica, decades before our story begins, were the Eco Poets, a collective who planted forests, gardens and small farms. But they were targeted as political “undesirables” and now their legacy is the scattered remains of their plantations, and the children they created through gene editing to be better adapted to the Antarctic climate, known as “huskies”.

Our heroine, Austral, is a husky. She’s large, strong and fat so that she doesn’t feel the cold. Discriminated against wherever she goes, she has limited employment options and few friends. Austral works as a prison guard at a penal colony, a rare job that she is well suited for. She dreams of living in an apartment in Auckland, an ordinary life somewhere safe – a dream that is simple and impossible.

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