London, 2027: Claire and Dan fall in love while preparing carbon-tracking reports. In 1856 New York, Eunice Foote discovers the greenhouse effect, but her breakthrough is dismissed because of her gender and status as an amateur scientist. And in a seed vault on Svalbard in 2100, pregnant Ana is waiting for a freak weather event to end so that she can go home and give birth in a safe, clean hospital.
Spanning a quarter of a millennium, Flora Wilson Brown’s The Beautiful Future Is Coming interweaves these three narratives into a conceptually dexterous examination of motherhood and climate anxiety. With each scenario seemingly haunted by absent children, Wilson Brown asks what it might take, and what it might promise, to bring a child into an increasingly ecologically inhospitable planet.
