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 to save, and what we sacrifice, become urgent.

McConaghy frames those choices through family bonds and a plea for climate action; Seed filters them through the lens of antinatalism. Seed formalises refusal through the narrator’s principled insistence on not reproducing, while Else imagines care as improvisation: a family learning to read Country and attune to non‑human signals in a context of uncertainty.

Antarctica as ethical sanctuary

Lee’s narrator, Mitch, is a biologist and outspoken antinatalist. His sixth stint on “Anarctos”, a secret Antarctic seed vault, becomes a study in paranoia.

Mitch reveres the ice for its “lavish indifference to human life” and treats Antarctica like an ethical sanctuary, a place where the apathy of the landscape might absolve him of human entanglements. That posture is tested by small anomalies: a cat that shouldn’t be there, radios that don’t behave and penguins appearing where they shouldn’t be.

The book’s most provocative move is to conflate antinatalism with cynicism, while poking holes in both. Mitch’s contempt for “breeders” is inseparable from his private grief; his ex‑wife is pregnant, and he can neither accept her decision nor resist the residual hope something between them might yet be salvaged.

Formally, the novel borrows from outpost paranoia and polar horror, like bestselling science-fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson’s 1997 eco-fiction, Antarctica, and Melbourne author Riley James’ The Chilling, a 2024 thriller set on an isolated Antarctic research station.

Seed’s rhythm feels circular. The daily routines – waking, working, meals, sex – recur so often that the tension they’re meant to build sometimes flattens. I found the polemic heavy-handed at points, and when the narrative ramps up, several ethical questions raised earlier remain hanging.

The closing chapters shift the book’s moral centre, but not in a way that fully resolves. Mitch’s antinatalism and conviction to “sav[e] the planet from people” often reads less like an argued position than a shield; a way to moralise detachment while punishing intimacy, particularly with women.

The Antarctic setting is exploitable for atmosphere, yet the novel’s ethical engine sometimes stalls in self regard.

Else: neurodivergence and hyper attention

By contrast, Else imagines continuance. Michael’s novella, structured around Indigenous seasonal knowledge and written in dense, fragmented prose, follows Leisl and Else as they leave the city for a derelict family house, then gradually move down the coast in search of safer ground.

The novel’s focus is on the mother‑daughter duo: Else is neurodivergent and communicates through humming, stimming and ingenious wordplay; Leisl is hyper attentive to the living world and a walking catalogue of species, constantly articulating the flux of climate and coastlines.

The result is a climate novel about language and attention.

Michael plays with dialogue as “trade”: one that is learned. The novel’s recurring irony is that human language is not the dominant language on Earth. In a world that is “more sea, now”, bioluminescent communication becomes the planet’s primary speech. This suggests humans are guests in a more‑than‑human conversation. The novel advocates a practice: adapt; listen; tune your body to animal signs; accept that “progress” isn’t inevitably positive. And keep asking: “what right do we have to feel at home?”

While Seed is largely interior, experienced through Mitch’s self‑justifying voice, Else distributes attention outward: to seasons, shorelines, currents and the phenomenology of weath