While Bradley described his previous novel Clade (2015), a landmark for the genre in terms of form and style, as ‘geological fiction’ exploring ‘timescales beyond the human’, Ghost Species carries a sense of unbearable urgency, a detailed account of  ‘accelerating collapse’. Seasons go awry, shifting in the course of mere decades in ways once associated with larger, geological timespans. A summer of ‘anxiety about fire and heat’ gives way to an August in which ‘there are fires, though that is no longer new’ and, towards the end of the novel, burning years where ‘winter will never arrive’.

The opening narrative, a brief jeremiad, hints at great personal and planetary loss as a mother tells her child a sweeping, fable-like history of the human species, a ‘story about a people long ago … who were not quite like us’. The continuing stakes of that history are made clear, when the mother admits that ‘she is not alone in despairing for what the future holds, in wanting to find ways to hold it back for as long as possible’. It is thus ‘a story she tells only on the edge of sleep because she does not want the child to ask her how it ends’. Although the identities of this mother–child dyad are unclear until much later, this initial sense of an ending lends the novel a kind of ecological grief that encodes the narrative with existential dread.

The core narrative begins in an all too plausible near future, tilted five minutes into the future, as it were. Californian tech billionaire Davis Hucken – a Silicon Valley analogue to Mark Zuckerberg – secures a vast portion of Tasmanian land for the Foundation, a secretive though outwardly philanthropic offshoot of the social media platform Gather, whose user base is said to exceed those of Instagram and Twitter combined. The Foundation’s principal aim is to re-engineer the climate by reviving extinct species. However, Davis has other ideas – a glint in his ‘colourless blue’ eyes – when he recruits scientists, Kate Larkin and her partner Jay, to head a top-secret program tasked with resurrecting the Neanderthals, ‘to re-engineer our relationship with nature, the way we think, the sorts of attitudes that have got us where we are’.

Unlike the winding, episodic structure in Clade, which creates a more otherworldly atmosphere, Ghost Species proceeds in a linear, at times breakneck, fashion, a deeply considered elegy with shades of the thriller. For in a matter of years (or paragraphs) they arrive at creation: Eve, the first and last of her kind. With her comes an awakening – and the novel’s central thesis – as Kate realises something:

This project is wrong, not because it is an exercise in vanity, because it places humans at the centre of things or pretends to godhood … Instead it is wrong because it fails to see their solution is part of the problem, a misplaced belief that this is another problem they can manage, engineer, control.

Against the directive of the Foundation, Kate contemplates mothering the Neanderthal child, wishing to guide her as she grows up.

As planetary breakdown quickens, the narrative shifts, refocused through Eve, as she struggles to comprehend our strange species: ‘violence … infects human society … Even the fires she can smell, the disruption of the forest can be seen as an expression of that same violence, enacted on a planetary scale.’ In the wake of civilisation, Eve finds refuge with a utopian enclave of sorts, an eco-community holding out against collapse and barbarism, eking out a little life. Even here, at the end of the world, she witnesses the ongoing ‘duplicity, the ease with which [they] lie and dissemble … Is it simply their nature? Or is it the price for their society? Their constant competition for status and power?’

Like many recent climate-change novels – for example, Richard Powers’s The Overstory (2018) – Ghost Species stresses that to address anthropogenic climate change not only requires immense social transformations, but also seismic cultural shifts, a recreation of the human.

As a friend laments to Eve: ‘We had forgotten how to imagine other worlds.’ But through Eve, often by way of counter-example, Bradley gestures towards what that ontological regenesis might be, sketching the faint contours of how we might ‘reveal the world, or perhaps … make a new one’ far different to our own.