Burning Sky x John Darnton (DRC)

408 pages.

First published May 14, 2024 (Skyhorse Publishing).

SF.

The central question of this novel: what if we didn’t have the sky anymore?

One of the most sci-fi-ey solutions to the climate crisis is geoengineering, geoforming, or climate engineering, and it’s been the subject of lots of fiction—including the concept of “areoforming”, or “terraforming” Mars, as seen in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy and many other books; and then more recently the idea of releasing particles into the atmosphere to cool Earth was explored in Apple TV’s Extrapolations (PS. I LOVED episode 5, set in Mumbai). In Darnton’s Burning Sky, a bunch of people undemocratically make the decision on behalf of the Global North (assuming, as IRL, that Global South nations would be “unreliable”—read, broke—partners) to modify the sky over the northern hemisphere; which, I had to suspend disbelief tbh, because surely you can’t be that precise? It bothered me the whole way through, tbh. But that’s what happens: the powers that be create the Cocoon, a layer of sulphur articles in the stratosphere, and the reader experiences this through the Cocoon’s coverage of, mostly, the US, and New York in particular. It’s a great concept for exploring the potential physical (weather, etc), societal, and psychological effects of geoforming.

It’s interesting that Darnton decided to tell the story through one family that ends up on different sides of the political divide. In fact, I felt like that rather brought the narrative down as it progressed, and I became a lot more interested in—well—everything else. It’s a really intriguing concept that the generation born after the Cocoon is in place can’t parse the colour blue—partly due to a decision made by those in power, but also because blue doesn’t really occur very much in nature, and without the sky we’d have so much less of it in life—something I learnt from the book.

Anyway: Burning Sky tickled my brain cells in most of the right ways, and is something readers of books like Veronica Roth’s Divergent series would enjoy. It’s dystopian and also hopepunkian, too: the Global South in the book shows humanity a possible way forward. I think the use of the “The One” trope didn’t really deliver for me as I would have hoped, but I still enjoyed the development of the main protagonist (and hated his ending). In other words/all of which to say: I enjoyed Burning Sky, and found it well worth my time, and also didn’t agree with all of the things the author did—which makes for a really solid read.

Many thanks to Skyhorse Publishing and NetGalley for early access.