Generation Nemesis, Sean’s novel of climate change revenge, was published by Wizard’s Tower Press in November 2022. It is set in 2045, when everyone born before the year 2000 is put on trial for the climate crimes of greed, squander, greed or display. The penalty is death, and the Auditor General of Audit Camp 71 has never pardoned anyone. The family of climatologist Jason Hall has been wiped out in this camp, and when he volunteers to be audited he discovers that the Auditor General is his granddaughter.
“As bleakly intense a take on climate change and its consequences as you will find.” Unbound Worlds Library
“If you’re not appalled, you’re reading it wrong.” Paul Graham Raven
“Chilling.” Locus
From the PROLOGUE:
When did it start to go so terribly wrong? Perhaps the catastrophe began when Thomas Newcomen invented his steam engine in 1712, or when a descendent of that engine was installed in a railway locomotive in 1804. There is certainly a case for declaring that early cars began transporting us along the road to ruin around 1900, and the aircraft that soon followed them led to a global tourism industry that flew us to disaster ten times faster. All those inventions took carbon out of the ground and dumped it into the atmosphere, all of them were tools for squander. Now squandering attracts the death penalty, and the methods of execution are very inventive.
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I shall start my story on a desert road, in the intense heat of a clear summer afternoon, greatly enhanced by greenhouse warming. Teams of people born before the new millennium were harnessed to wagons, and I was one of them. Those wagons were SUVs stripped of their engines, bonnets and seats, and loaded with water, food and desiccated bodies. The road was not well maintained, but that was deliberate.
We were being taught the hard way just how much energy was required to move a vehicle, and how much of that energy had been squandered moving billions of those vehicles for a century and a half. Each of the SUVs was painted with words declaring NO FUEL RESOURCES ARE BEING CONSUMED ON THIS JOURNEY.
We were tippers on our way to be audited, and the process was supposed to be fair. Even when your climate crime was so serious that death was not sufficient punishment, you still got an audit. We were being taken into the desert to Audit Camp 71, where passably affluent people with European backgrounds were audited for climate crimes by their Generation Victim peers. A third of us had already died.
