Deborah Tomkins’ novella, Aerth, starts as it means to go on, in the set of moods grammarians call irrealis — the ways we talk about things that only might happen, such as the conditional, or subjunctive. ‘Had Magnus of Arden stayed home, enjoyed his party, blown out the seven candles on his cake, he would not now be sitting at the top of an oak tree, quietly observing like an explorer.’ The sense of self-cancelling possibility here, neither the real nor the unreal prevailing, is eminently fitted to this sly, well-constructed work of ‘cli-fi’ about possible worlds and what we can take from them.

Magnus, we learn, lives on Aerth, where, in the kingdoms that make up an alternative ‘Angleland’ at least, people live in harmony with nature. Theirs is a matriarchal society, intentionally small-scale. They live a low-tech, low impact life, amidst abundant animals — bears and wolves, birds and insects — and abiding by five principles. Aerth is a green world — think of Shakespeare, transforming this same Warwickshire forest of Arden into the idyll of As You Like It — but it is cooling, a consequence of not enough anthropogenic climate change. And it has a small population, winnowed by an historic pandemic.

For these reasons, while it is a beautiful place, life there is not easy. We watch Magnus grow up, enraptured by the possibilities of an elsewhere — several times, as in that first sentence, we are informed that he is an ‘explorer’. The story is told episodically, in the short segments of narrative that its practitioners call ‘flash fiction’, though the episodic style has been used to strong effect in novels such as Kathryn Scanlan’s Kick the Latch. In the shadows between these flashes, Magnus grows and takes on some of the sadness of adulthood, sadness he seeks to escape.

Naturally enough for an explorer, he joins Aerth’s space programme, first to help explore Mars, and then, a miraculous new planet that has been discovered. Hidden behind the sun, ‘at exactly the same distance’ from it as Aerth, is a mirror world, which its inhabitants call ‘Urth’. Where Aerth is crunchy, harmonious, and cold, Urth is hot and fractious, high-tech, an exaggeration of Earth’s bustle. When Magnus lands, he soon becomes a victim of the cynicism and politicking of the rapacious Urthlings, obliged to give his ‘full support’ to the Prime Minister of Urth Britian. Urth, it turns out, does not want to hear from its greener counterpart; even Magnus’s lover refuses, really, to believe that he comes from another world.

Tomkins takes advantage of the fact that each new flash is its own story to vary what in more conventional SF we might call world-building. Magnus’s restlessness is established in the form of a school creative writing exercise; the cynicism of Urthlings is effectively rendered in the form of a one-sided interview; while Urth’s barrenness is glimpsed at an altitude, breaking out into something like verse to describe the last remaining hectare of rainforest.

A hundred tall trees
stand alone,
vulnerable,
beyond the scrub,
beyond the airport,

beyond reach.

Not all of these little genre-exercises are equally effective. The white space, here, strikes me as precious rather than profound. But more often than not, Tomkins uses her form with a real clarity of purpose. What she is after, it seems, is the sense of uncertainty that climate change generates at a scale that conventional realism cannot really make vivid. Instead, therefore, we have to turn to irrealis. The language of what might be, could have been, or is not.

Aerth is not a satirical, or a critical work, or rather these levels are not the ones Tomkins gives weight to. If you want to learn how a society might fail to fix a complex problem, you’re probably better off looking elsewhere. Tomkins is concerned with how it feels to know that we dwell in possibility. This is, predictably perhaps, both a blessing and a curse. Once Magnus is settled on Urth, he is unsettled by the dreams of Aerth. By the dream of making a home somewhere. Urth itself is doomed by its endless speculative activity. On our Earth, eco-activists, similar to the ones Magnus ends up joining on Urth, will rightly tell you this is the only planet we’ve got, but they will also insist that another world is possible. Internalising both truths is hard work, but it is the task Tomkins sets her readers.

Each section tends to offer itself as a way of presenting the kind of epiphany or poetic insight that often constitutes a relationship to home, moments when a thing did not seem to be stable, or perhaps seemed unusually stable, and either way opens up a new way of seeing a place or object, both related to and apart from us. Here, for example, Tomkins has Magnus reflecting on the difference between Urth and Aerth’s version of Arden:

No massive oak forests. No deer, rabbits or squirrels. No grey wolf slipping between trees. No brown bears ambling along invisible paths. No elk, no shaggy red cattle, no wild ponies. No wheeling flocks of birds.

The negativity of the list, present to the reader in its absence, strikes me as emblematic of how Tomkins sets about constructing eco-consciousness.

There is, I think, partly as a consequence of the short form, an over-dependency on nouns, on objects themselves as resonant in their presence. Take the moment Magnus encounters a local pub in the Urthian version of Warwickshire: ‘The doors, such familiar doors, carved in the heavy black oak, of the ancient Moot Hall of Magnus’s childhood’. Such intoning seems a bit ponderous, much like the doors themselves, I suppose. Still, I was impressed by the variety of uses to which Tomkins puts her lists and epiphanies. When he abandons his comfortable Urth apartment, for example, realising that he will never be listened to, we get a pithy little parable about consumerism:

Magnus opens the kitchen cupboard, surveying their contents like a naturalist on new terrain—chickpeas tinned tomatoes apple puree cinnamon mustard sardines garlic seweed piodwer qunioa chocolate cupcake mix honey anchovies rye crackers marmalade baked beans oregano passionfruit juice—then tips it all into one glorious casserole in a magnificent never once used cast iron dish which he slides into the oven at two hundred degrees, before washing the wooden spoon and wiping down the surfaces. He piles the recycling neatly in a corner.

Individually, these things are wonderful, but what they have in common is that we waste them.

In physics and philosophy, alternate worlds are used to solve problems, to make various models of reality make sense. In fiction they tend to be used for something closer to diagnostic purposes — Thomas More’s account, in Utopia, for example, of a traveller who returns from the New World with a vision of a society entirely unlike that of early-modern Europe with its enclosures, ostentatious wealth and its private property, says more about what is wrong with his homeland than what is right with Utopia.

Tomkins, however much she might bemoan the wastefulness of Urth, is not concerned with More’s diagnostic move. It seems, rather, that the imaginative act itself, the opening up of possibility is to be tenderly examined. That is where fiction and the environment touch. We have imagined ourselves into this world. Where does our love for it, our will to change come from, if not from the same place that ruins it? How can we redirect our imagination?

In Magnus’s case, that means coming home. The care with which we are reminded of the present world, the only one that can actually be lived in at any given time, no matter how many worlds exist, is to the novel and Tomkins’ credit.

Hugh Foley is the author of an academic monograph on 20th-century poetry and several study guides for children. He runs a Substack newsletter, Useless Concentration. A pamphlet, Recent Poems, was recently published by Fair Organ Press.

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