It’s a fable because it’s easier to show things going well in fable or fairy-tale form. In The Red Children, the most important thing for me was to inspire readers by showing human beings who manage to find their best selves and thus move towards a more hopeful future.

If you keep hitting a stick in the same place on the same door, sometimes the people behind it just defend it more strongly, or retreat further inside. In 2022, however, as the real crisis gets worse, I am aware of how many people’s minds have become anaesthetised by fear and boredom in the face of something unfathomably big. So I wrote books like Where are the Snows (1990) and The Ice People (1996), set in the future, and then a more mythic book, The Flood (2004), which was nevertheless inspired by the real floods that swept Europe in the preceding years. At the beginning of my interest in the issue, back in the eighties and more strongly in the nineties, I thought my job, as one of the first novelists who took climate change seriously, was to imagine it and make it painfully real for the readers as a warning, using all the knowledge at my disposal. What can novelists offer the climate crisis? We’re not quite like journalists and scientists who are doing amazing work recording and spreading factual reports about climate change. I agree that ‘funny and upbeat’ sounds odd when we’re talking about climate change – but maybe it’s time to try talking in a different way.

I hope my viewpoint on life – I find it absurd and endlessly fascinating – makes it funny, and the happy ending (of sorts) makes it upbeat. It enlists the aboriginal and ‘uncontacted peoples’ of the world in a carnival of opposition to the anti-life developers. MG: Yes indeed, The Red Children is a fable or as I sometimes think, a fairy-tale for adults. Could you expand on this? You describe it as a fable are you aiming (and hoping) to engage readers in a different way? SE: You said that you wanted to write an ‘upbeat, funny novel’ about climate change, which seems a pretty big ask. Professor Maggie Gee speaks to Writers Rebel’s Sharon Eckman about her new book The Red Children, released today, and how it might inspire wider understanding and action around climate change.

The White Family by Maggie Gee