With the widespread damage to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, a spate of catastrophic hurricanes, an increase in infectious diseases related to global warming, and the fires in the Amazon rainforest and California, the climate change picture turns darker every day. Influenced by such dire events, some authors have decided to explore the tragic consequences of this relentless assault on Mother Earth in eco-fiction. Kirkus Indie recently reviewed three novels in this category.
In The Fourth Generation, by Roy Mankovitz and Alan Mankovitz (a father and son team), the world faces two deadly plagues. The mysterious outbreaks may be linked to Veregro, a manufacturer of insect repellent and seeds. A company executive joins forces with a former Veregro attorney to quickly search for answers. According to our reviewer, “Readers will turn the pages with their stomachs in knots, hoping that some biological solution can be found” in this “frightening” eco-thriller.
A key figure in Ted Bernard’s Late-K Lunacy turns out to be Katja Nickleby, an academic and author of Over the Cliff, a 21st-century Silent Spring. Her protégé becomes a professor at Gilligan University, where a student uncovers an energy magnate’s plot to procure the mining rights to the college’s old-growth forest. While investigations reveal massive corruption, a bigger disaster looms. Our critic calls the book “a passionately cautionary eco-tainment tale that cross-pollinates an impressive garden of genres.”
The melting of Antarctica’s ice caps results in a new frontier in K.E. Lanning’s Listen to the Birds. Unfortunately, the continent’s first-generation settlers must contend with a dangerous Christian cult trying to poach animals in a refuge. Then the cult kidnaps a team of scientists working there. “Like the best eco-fiction, Lanning’s tale will get the audience thinking seriously about the effect every human endeavor has on the ecosystem,” our reviewer writes.
Myra Forsberg is an Indie editor.
