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After the actual text (certainly in the ARC), Rankin-Gee has also included a list of resources and information about the very real versions of the events of the books. She highlights several of the existing government programmes designed to regenerate towns and to displace those from the cities. Nothing in Dreamland is as farfetched as we’d like it to be. I have family in Kent and live in Norfolk. I have seen coastal erosion and its effects first-hand, so seeing the potential impact of the climate change for these areas long-term does have a scary edge to it. I know about Localisation. I know all that. We're supposed to look after ourselves. But people were dying. And when they did come, the London people, the government or whatever, it wasn't ambulances. It wasn't to help people fix their houses. They arrested people who were stealing. Not even bad stealing. Stealing to eat." The journey begins in Australia, increasingly taking centre stage because it sits below the world’s most economically and militarily powerful dictatorship – China.
Dreamland by Rosa Rankin-Gee | Goodreads Dreamland by Rosa Rankin-Gee | Goodreads
Your mum, Maggie Gee, has written on similar themes, most recently in The Red Children . Is there any kind of rivalry between the two of you about who gets to tell speculative stories set on the Kent coast? Climate change brings scorching summers and rising sea levels; there’s a great “washout” early in the book, a huge tide surging through the town causing devastating floods and drownings, something that becomes a more regular occurrence until townsfolk plan their day’s movements by the high tide times that make the streets impassable. The premise of Station Eleven, for those who haven’t read it, is that a travelling symphony is moving on a circuit through an obliterated North America, performing the works of Shakespeare. I saw Emily St John Mandel speaking about this book at Shakespeare & Company just after it came out in 2014, and she said that in initial versions of the book, she also wanted them to be performing sitcom scripts, like an episode of Friends or How I Met Your Mother, so it would be like a palimpsest archive of culture from Shakespeare to modern times. I think she made the right decision, but I think it’s a funny bit of metadata about this book. He goes on to consider The Sahel, a region below the Sahara, which has seen an estimated 3.8million people displaced in recent years, many seeking to reach Europe, and that number is only set to climb.London is still a dominant global financial powerhouse and the UK also has an astonishing output of culture, both of which earn immense sums for UK plc. It is also seeking new alliances but fears the economic and military consequences of an independent Scotland. Ha, I love that distinction. First up, we have The Dog Stars by Peter Heller. It’s a post-pandemic novel. Could you tell us about why you admire it? It is the repository of untold secrets and last seen on Taryn’s grandfather’s bookshelves – so the searchers are convinced Taryn knows its whereabouts. It is proof that while these two qualities are often rendered as rose-tinted, heartwarmingly light and bright things, they are in fact incredibly robust and tenacious, as far from a sweet ditty in a cloying animated feature film as its possible to get. Whether it’s the sky or the light or something else altogether Thanet still feels like elsewhere, somewhere separate, still carrying the sensations and name of an island even though the channel that once cut it adrift silted up half a millennium ago. You can barely see the join now, but you can definitely feel it.
Rosa Rankin-Gee
This subplot underpins a wonderfully entertaining and lucid account, written with wit, pace and clarity. When the government was bad, charity would come our way,” says Chance of her teenage years. “NGOs, non-profits, go-it-aloners. When the government got worse, we’d get less – people needed what they had at home. These were the rhythms we lived by.” This compelling novel is horribly plausible, chilling and feels eerily like a warning that’s come too late. In the morning, some of the wind turbines out at sea had lost propellers. They looked like daisies with their petals ripped off.”Pessimistic forecasts put 2037, which is where the main part of the story takes place, at 2 ft+, but it’s not linear or predictable. There are lots of terrifying potential tipping points. Steady declines, and then cliff-edges. The Australians also face the challenge of climate change and the risk of large-scale population shifts. Marshall explores the fascinating possibility of governments being forced to build new major cities on more hospitable territory.
Book review: Dreamland | New Humanist Book review: Dreamland | New Humanist
In many ways, it doesn’t feel like a novel. It doesn’t really have a beginning, middle and end. You could read it over years if you wanted to. I think that brings us to your last near-future dystopia book recommendation, which is Z for Zachariah by Robert C O’Brien. It was completed by his wife and daughter posthumously. I don’t know. There are so many scenes, and most of them seem frozen now. My mum too — I’d freeze her right then if I could. After we got the news about her parents, she decided, she told us, to relax a little. Which meant go out more. There were nights when she came home with blood on her top, or no shoes on — with Liam, without him — but she was still just about on the edge of being okay then. Mark: Can you say a few words about how the elements, themes and locations in Dreamland came together, and how Chance came into view as the main protagonist and narrator. I looked out of the window and along the coast. There was this spreading out of light, all of it like fern unfolding in a nature documentary.”
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Dreamland brings us face-to-face with much of what we’re on the threshold of losing; nevertheless, it manages to convince us that its characters have everything still to live for.” Guardian As I was saying before, dialogue is really hard to do. And this has perhaps sixty different voices. It’s polyphonic. Max Brooks is able to inhabit all these different characters. It’s an astounding piece of work. I feel quite evangelical about it.
Rosa Rankin-Gee: Planet Thanet - Bookanista Rosa Rankin-Gee: Planet Thanet - Bookanista
It is the twin sustainers of love and hope that help Chance to weather grief, disappointment and what effectively amounts to governmental genocide of its poorer citizens, and which given Dreamland such a rich, living quality, a tangible, palpable reminder that the human spirit can rise to immense challenges if given even half a chance. The Mirror's travel newsletter brings you the latest news and expert analysis from across the industry, as well as plenty of travel inspiration.Exactly. Except it had, like, a single pair of underwear and a can of beans in it. But there was this feeling that something might happen, and you need to be ready. I talked about that before—the teetering feeling of fear and hope and agency… catnip to a young teenager. That book is very different in tone, but it’s similar in its brilliance, and that you have a female narrator in her teens. In How I Live Now, the narrator’s mum has died and her dad has sent her to England to stay with her cousins who are wild marauders who live in a large country house. War breaks out while she’s there. The interesting thing in this novel is that—unlike Ann in Z is for Zachariah who is quite self-contained and quite spartan throughout—the How I Live Now narrator has very teenage preoccupations and energy and spunk, and the war is happening at great remove from them until it suddenly intervenes. Dreamland – which shares its name with the long-established amusement park on Margate seafront – is a novel seven years in the making, its gestation predating the division caused by the build up to and fallout from Brexit. The B-word doesn’t appear in the book but the related and growing divides in our society are portrayed and expanded in unflinching terms. It’s a contemporary novel, about a gay man and gay woman who fall in love, but it’s also – in a prequel-esque way – within the Dreamland universe. I’m having a lot of fun with it. is touted as the deadline for the world to go carbon neutral and preserve natural habitats. How optimistic are you that we’ll make it?
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