Two new Australian novels imagine how we might live in a climate‑changed future. Bri Lee’s Seed explores antinatalism in an Antarctic seed vault. And Rose Michael’s Else follows a mother and daughter improvising survival on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula.

Together, these novels ask what we owe future generations – and what forms of care remain possible when the planet itself becomes precarious.

Antinatalism is the view that bringing new humans into the world is morally suspect because life entails unavoidable harm. It has become increasingly visible alongside escalating climate anxiety. In fiction, the question tends to crystallise around the figure of “the child as future”: should we burden the planet with more lives, and burden those lives with the planet we have made?

Review: Seed – Bri Lee (Summit); Else – Rose Michael (Spineless Wonders)

Alice Robinson’s 2024 novel If You Go pushed that question into speculative territory. In it, a mother wakes a century after being cryogenically suspended, and must reckon with the failure to prepare her children for a world remade by climate and social collapse.

Lee’s Seed and Michael’s Else approach the matter of future generations from opposite directions. Seed situates its enquiry inside an ambitious thriller: a secret Antarctic seed bank, a month‑long mission and communications failures.

Else is a lyrical, experimental novella charting seasonal adaptation as a mother (Leisl) and daughter (Else) move down the “Ninch” – local slang for the Mornington Peninsula – as floods and fires reconfigure their world.

Both books are recognisably climate fiction, but they part ways on what climate ethics look like in practice. Lee’s novel sits alongside Charlotte McConaghy’s Wild Dark Shore, published earlier this year, in its use of a seed vault as a narrative device – a high‑stakes backdrop where questions of what we choose........

© The Conversation