Eric Barnes

In Above the Ether (Arcade), the prequel to Eric Barnes’s acclaimed cli-fi novel, The City Where We Once Lived, six sets of characters move through a landscape and a country just beginning to show the signs of cataclysmic change. While every night the news alternates images of tsunami destruction with the baseball scores, the characters converge on a city where the forces of change have already broken — a city half abandoned, with one part left to be scavenged as the levee system protecting it slowly fails — until, in their vehicles on the highway that runs through it, they witness the approach of what looks to be just one more violent storm. A mesmerizing novel of unfolding dystopia amid the effects of climate change in a world very like our own, Above the Ether is for readers of Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven and Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood.