Ann Dombroski
After the Great Storm
People can be snobs about science fiction, and I admit that until a few years back I was one of them. Meanwhile, I had absolutely no problem seeing the literary merit in magical realism, romance fiction – arguably the most implausible genre of all – even fantasy. Science fiction seemed like a negatively masculine genre to me – a place where men could nerd out fantasising about high-tech apocalypses and cyborg women with innumerable breasts.
This changed when a co-worker recommended Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, which imagines a post-apocalyptic future in which climate change and corporate greed have resulted in immense wealth inequality and society’s collapse. How to fight the powers that be, how to make a better world from the shambles of the present? In the uncanny realm of science fiction, these big questions find the space to be explored.
Enter After the Great Storm by Australian writer Ann Dombroski. Set in Sydney 50 years in the future, after the titular “Great Storm”, our protagonist is Alice Kaczmarek, a doctor whose husband, Daniel, is serving a life sentence for causing a catastrophic transport accident. Alice is convinced that Daniel has been unfairly framed by government forces involved in a cover-up and is trying to secure his release by any means necessary.
When the mysterious “T” – a genetically modified bat/human hybrid – turns up wounded at Alice’s door, a complex and dangerous spool of nefarious connections and scams begins to unravel. Big Pharma, for-profit aged care, the prison-industrial complex, state interference in women’s bodily autonomy, bribery within the medical system, debt collectors, state surveillance and biowarfare are just some of the evil structural forces at play in this dark, twisty novel.
Alice is our unlikely hero – a woman stuck in the tricky position of having to choose between what is best for her husband, his brother, her grandmother, T, her friends, and for herself – all while battling the seedy forces of neoliberalism.
How many of her principles will she be willing to sacrifice to protect the people she loves? Is it okay to be complicit in flawed systems if the result is freedom for a select few? Further, as Alice herself asks: “And if your character, shaped by circumstance, was destiny, how much choice did you actually have?” What agency do we have in our own lives when climate crisis and economic precarity dictate our choices?
Academic Lars Schmeink characterises “posthumanist biopunk” as a genre of literature involving “a world of rampant capitalism, of individualistic consumer societies, leading to a global ecological catastrophe, the development of transgenic species ... and ultimately the creation of a rival species of posthumans”. The transgenic species in After the Great Storm are not yet developed enough to pose a genocidal threat to humanity, but the rest of Schmeink’s description is on the money. The major stress and the one inescapable fact of life in this novel is capital, and not having enough of it.
Alice’s friend Charmaine is considering moving her children into her own bedroom so she can sublet their room for extra rent. T agrees to surgery because she is in debt. Every day, Alice is stressed about paying her mortgage, about affording transport: “She tried to compartmentalise her problems, to work through each one in a logical way. A new lawyer for Daniel, palliative care for T, the embryo transfer, a robot for Vinnie – but all the solutions boiled down to a single issue: money.”
Alice may be living in a post-apocalyptic future, but the parallels with the present could not be clearer. Climate crisis is engendering more and more radical inequality and as governments and big business continue to brazenly ignore this, the disparity between the ultra-rich few and the poverty-stricken many only grows.
Written with less earnestness or with less care for its characters, Dombroski’s novel could read as overly moralistic, and on occasion it does teeter on the edge of didacticism. Overall, however, this is a story full of love against the odds, of grassroots mutual aid, of people trying – and sometimes failing – to care for each other. Alice’s choices are very human and her motivations multifaceted enough to prevent her from becoming a symbol rather than a character.
In Parable of the Sower, the answer to community-building within climate catastrophe is radical empathy and a complete disavowal of the bureaucratic state. In After the Great Storm, the thesis is less clear-cut. Empathy is important, yes – but backroom deals are made, concessions granted.
To my taste, the novel’s ending veers too far into the realm of reproductive futurism. Surely there are other ways to imagine a better future than to invest all one’s hope into the propagation of the family unit? I’m sure others will disagree with me here. Either way, this is a novel that makes us think, forces us to interrogate the conditions under which we live, and asks us what it is to live ethically. This is what fiction should do, and After the Great Storm does it.
Transit Lounge, 304pp, $32.99
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on February 15, 2025 as "After the Great Storm".
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