Geordie Williamson

And she takes on the challenge that he set out for her of completing the game that he started writing for her.

Yeah, look, the Babylon, and I found this the most kind of thrilling and obviously kind of freely imaginative strand of the novel.

The Babylon is, yeah, it's like Blade Runner in that the future and the past are so unevenly distributed.

So although we're half a millennium into the future, nonetheless, it's run by sale and

There are some technologies available, but they have been bought at great cost.

They've got just enough tech to keep the old girl running, but not enough to actually kind of make a real living for themselves.

So Yesiko has inherited the boat from her father.

who became addicted to a drug of choice for this brave new world called Hum, which is basically a way out from what is an intolerable drowned world post-climate change and civil breakdown.

So listeners may have been here before.

This is quite well-trodden ground now.

I know for years we said there wasn't much writing about climate change, but this is cli-fi, I think, that's already kind of presumed certain tropes and integrated them into the story.

Chaya's really fascinating.

And she is, in fact, the link that joins together these four generations of women over this half a millennium period of time.

Because Chaya, who we meet at the beginning of the sort of 26th century strand, has actually been invented or created half a millennium before by a woman named Tamar Portman.

who's a bioengineering professor, and she's been given the task of creating these robots who are going to go out into the world and they're sort of delicate ecological sensing systems.

And what they're going to do is they are going to provide...

the kind of real-world data that allows the world to be our world, this world, to be healed.

What she doesn't realise is that the whole robot project has been brought up by, cue the billionaire, the tech bro.

I can't imagine that.

Who, surprise, surprise, instead takes them all out of commission and puts them as kind of robot helpers on space arcs that he sells places at excruciating costs to humans who may wish to leave Earth and go to restart things on another planet.