'A Sister for Venus' is a climate fiction novel that seeks to explore, in an accessible way, one of the innumerable futures that could lie beyond our past and present failure to recognise that we are conducting a vast and unthinking experiment with our planet's biosphere.
Initially, the story is set in the Midlands of twenty-first century England.
Kirk is distracted by recent events in his private life but mysterious happenings near his house draw him to investigate. Suddenly, he knows far more than he ever wanted to know and in the social chaos that follows, he flees with his neighbour Rose, to what they believe will be the seclusion and relative security of the Somerset Levels.
Unknown to them both, however, it will be from there that the future of what was once the United Kingdom will begin to unfold. Unwittingly, together with family and neighbours, they are drawn into a desperate battle to fight off an expeditionary force of armed invaders and to survive in the aftermath of a powerful storm.
England continues to descend into both climate and social chaos such that Kirk's grandchildren find themselves living in a very different world from that envisaged by their grandparents. Not all knowledge of the past has been lost, though and it is the community's need for electricity that sends three young people on a dangerous mission into Cornwall and into contact with the perils of summer heat and the dark side of the County's sailing heritage.
In the generation that follows, the diminished population supplements its farming with hunting but whilst the community continues to seek security in its seclusion, it is unaware that it has drawn the unwanted attention of people who have regressed to England's barbaric past. Finally, though, the fate of the community and its world is decided not by human events but by the tipping of Earth into a future that, at the outset, seemed beyond imagination...
