“A dystopian sci-fi novel imagines a future New England crippled by pollution and under the control of ruthless corporate patriarchs.”
—Kirkus Reviews (see complete Kirkus review here)
“If you are prone to believe that even severe climate change will be well managed, that future governments will calmly move cities inland, providing good jobs in construction and engaging our better selves, Kitty Beer will turn you inside out. The compelling, gutsy characters, the cults and marauding private armies, the Prudential Tower poking out of the Boston Sea and other vivid landscapes, are horribly credible. If Beer’s trilogy, set in the 2040s, 2060s, and continuing here in the 2080s with The Hampshire Project, can’t inspire you to action, nothing will.”
—Robert Socolow, Princeton University Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and co-director of Princeton Environment Institute
“Kitty Beer’s latest novel, The Hampshire Project, third in her Resilience trilogy, offers a foreboding, forbidding, vision of a future, post climate change New England. What was once the proud city of Boston is now underwater, victim of major rise in global sea level. Anarchy reigns. Fresh water is in short supply, available only to those who can afford to pay. Droughts, heat waves, violent storms and devastating tornadoes define the new normal. Could this be the future? Hopefully not. The Hampshire Project sounds a prescient warning though that the potential for disruptive change in future climate is real: it is not a hoax as some would suggest. Should The Hampshire Project raise public consciousness as to the need for action to address the climate issue, that would represent an important bonus. The book is a great read. I recommend it with enthusiasm and without qualification.”
—Michael B. McElroy, Gilbert Butler Professor of Environmental Studies, Harvard University
“The Hampshire Project, the conclusion of Kitty Beer’s powerful trilogy of an environmentally dystopian future, is a wake-up call we owe to our great-grandchildren to heed. But beyond being a chillingly plausible vision of a ruined Earth, this is a tale told with subtlety and compassion. She offers fully formed characters who leap off the pages, by turns surprising us and angering us and eliciting our sympathy and understanding. In The Hampshire Project novelist Kitty Beer asks, and answers, the question that lies at the heart of all great fiction: How do we live in the world we have been given?”
— Charles Coe, Author, All Sins Forgiven: Poems for My Parents, Artist-in-Residence for the city of Boston
Industry Reviews
A dystopian sci-fi novel imagines a future New England crippled by pollution and under the control of ruthless corporate patriarchs.
In 2082, ongoing opportunistic development and runaway pollution have rendered the planet nearly uninhabitable. Lack of resources, coupled with an endless succession of natural disasters, including tornadoes, tsunamis, and wildfires, left a crumbling infrastructure and the rise of religious and economic autocrats who battle one another for power over the vulnerable population. Tiny Tully Island is an enclave of independent resistance to both the cult of the Hartford priests and the false benevolence of the Sanmart Corporation based in Albany. Herbal healer Fair and her adopted daughter, Terra, have a happy life there until concern for the safety of Fair’s son, Orion, takes them on a rescue mission, where they discover just how dangerous tyranny and elitism can be. In this dystopian novel, Beer (Human Scale, 2010, etc.) confronts a number of topical issues in a gripping, quick-paced tale of greed and self-sacrifice set in the near future. In a few careful phrases, Beer evokes the tenuous position of Tully (“Democracy keeps its head up here, along with a canny system of hiding their resources from the outside world”; the desperate squalor of a refugee camp (“rat stew”); and the frightening sincerity of the authoritarian apologist who says of democracy, “Fair to who? Think about it. Do you want folks who are stupid or ignorant or just plain twisted to be deciding your affairs?” One hardly begrudges a few amazing coincidences, such as Terra’s ease in finding her long-lost birth father, on the way to the satisfyingly ambiguous ending.
A view of the possible results of unbridled corporatism that is both unsettling and empowering.
Kirkus Reviews
