Books

Jennifer Mills
Salvage

Jennifer Mills is one of Australia’s most innovative writers; in Josephine Rowe’s words, “a deeply empathetic genius”. Salvage is Mills’ sixth book and its speculative fiction narrative of near-future climate change and an escape to the stars builds on the environmentally and socially concerned fiction of her previous works. These include the award-winning Dyschronia, which immerses itself in the warped temporality of climate change, and The Airways, a ghost story of queer identity. Australian literary culture tends strongly towards the realist and the anti-intellectual, the apolitical: in her work, Mills messes with all these orthodoxies.

Salvage’s protagonist is Jude, a woman always on the brink of leaving. She lives in the intentional community of Northport, somewhere in Europe, shortly after a war has convulsed the continent. This is a region called the Freelands, where “when new people arrived, they were assigned a place that would suit their needs”. It’s a society “maddeningly devoted to democratic participation”, but Jude “never went to the meetings”. She relies on this community for her safety and her sanity, for the friends who love her and whom she routinely shuns, but she sees herself as an outsider, someone who works best alone. As Anne Boyer writes in the novel’s epigraph, “To be cared for is the invisible substructure of autonomy”: despite her best efforts to leave, the caring of Northport keeps Jude alive.

Jude believes she can’t afford to be known because she comes from one of the families who caused the catastrophes of climate and economics that now plague the Freelands. Born in a shanty town in Western Australia, Jude was taken in by a wealthy mining family when their operations killed her parents. Raised mostly by her older sister, who is heir to the family fortune and comfortable in her role, Jude grew up shielded from the troubles of a world convulsed by climate change.

Salvage is told in braided narratives: Jude the fostered child, Jude the dysfunctional adult, and Jude’s sister, Celeste, the only person she is close to. During Jude’s adolescence, she and Celeste are given the chance to escape Earth on a for-profit version of the International Space Station, the Endeavour. It marks the end of the sisters’ relationship. Jude runs away – “It’s a fantasy,” she says, “there are no other planets near enough or safe enough, and this one isn’t dying” – while Celeste goes into hibernation out past the moon – “Imagine, all that space and quiet.” In gorgeous vignettes, we hear Celeste’s story as she walks the corridors of the station and tries to remember who and where she is. We wake, sleep, wake and sleep with Celeste as her mind atrophies in this crumbling off-world infrastructure, headed for doom.

Always on the move, after Jude leaves her sister she travels to the Northern Territory, where she lives for a while in a camp then joins the staff of a luxury cruise ship that, avoiding disasters, never docks. Here, she discovers that the Endeavour has lost contact with Earth and her sister is presumed dead. She tells nobody why this matters to her. Eventually Jude makes her way to Northport, where she becomes the community’s truck driver, ferrying supplies and people around the Freelands. Despite her integral role and despite – or perhaps because of – a promise of romance with the town’s new medic, Jude is about to leave again when part of the Endeavour washes up on Northport’s shore. Inside is a catatonic woman: Celeste. Forces from the neighbouring authoritarian state come to collect the fallen astronaut and Jude must decide whether to tell the community about her past life so she can save her sister, or to flee, “as though the purpose of life is simply to grow lighter, to retreat”.

Mills’s novels disturb the conventions of genre. In Salvage, she finds a new way to write Australian dystopia. Conventionally, authors who grapple with our near future lean towards worlds where society has collapsed and the protagonist fights alone for their survival: they are elegies, warnings, end-of-the-world worst-case scenarios. Mills, in contrast, doesn’t give up on us.

Unsurprisingly for an author who has worked to build collective bargaining for writers, Mills sees power in community. She notices the moments of beauty, joy and togetherness that exist now and that will exist even in our compromised future. In Salvage, she deconstructs the causes of the calamity – the rabid selfishness of profit-driven late capitalism – and presents collectives working together to overcome them, guided by ethics such as, “If you can help, help.” This is speculative fiction in the vein of Kim Stanley Robinson – if KSR wrote beautiful prose and fully realised characters – written with a deep, critical understanding of structures, economies and politics, testing out solutions that are about social revolution rather than technological breakthroughs.

Salvage is a deeply compassionate novel, fierce in its love for the Earth and staunch in its defence. Mills sees the world as it is. In one scene she writes of the tearful attention paid by the media to the eight doomed inhabitants of the Endeavour while at the same time “the war has buried thousands of civilians in the rubble of their homes. No-one is timing their deaths, very possibly no-one is recording their names”.

She does not shy away from the disasters coming for us and those already here. But Mills has little time for tech-bro fantasies of escape, for the idea that some people might be safe while everyone else burns. We will all be safe, all be free, Salvage tells us, or none of us will. “Maybe the world they knew is ending,” Mills writes, “but another is blooming … You have to find a way to live in it.”

Picador, 448pp, $34.99

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on June 14, 2025 as "Salvage".

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