Most of us like a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down—and Bruce Ballister’s Room for Tomorrow provides exactly that, concerning the mess we are making of our planet.
A fast-moving plot and edgy characters provide the sugar that makes the grim picture of our future in the year 2214 easier to stomach. The novel also offers hope and a scientifically sound, well-researched prescription for what ails us.
His novel joins the growing canon of climate fiction, like Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Risk.
The story begins in 2020 with a rip-roaring car race between the two principal characters, attorney Parker Parrish and corporate security expert Carl Reyes. Their passion for fast and furious, expensive cars draws them together in what would become far more than a romance—in fact, they form a partnership to save the world.
The sci-fi aspect of the novel is their stumbling onto a portal north of Los Angeles that opens into another world. The world of 2214. A world so destroyed by environmental degradation, climate change, shortage of resources, and nuclear war that a few characters from the future time travel to 2020 to pilfer resources and knowledge that has disappeared.
The time travelers reluctantly let our clever duo, Parker and Carl, see what the future holds. What they learn shakes the very foundations of their lives. They have trouble accepting that “short term financial greed, religious dogmas, and tribal jealousy” will “bring an end to civilization.” As they ponder the horrors facing future generations, they are compelled to risk everything—even their lives—to change the outcome.
Their company, Room for Tomorrow, sets out to educate the public, debunk false narratives, take on Big Oil, and promote better use of resources to avoid nuclear war. One major thrust of their work is to convince corporations that it is in their best interests to do the right thing. They struggle to convince global leaders to choose science over politics. It’s tough, because, as Parker notes, capitalism currently only measures success as growth, but needs to temper that model by measuring sustainability.
One interesting twist Ballister pulls off quite well is the creation of a noticeably different, yet easily translatable dialect for characters from the future. Language always does change—just ask high schoolers trying to read Shakespeare—so it adds a realistic note to Ballister’s vision. Another plus is that Ballister’s engineering background provides depth and breadth to the novel’s solutions.
While the content is dense with technological descriptions at times, it also offers some lovely prose, like this description of LA weather: “The cloud deck on the Pacific side was piling over the ridgeline, sucking the joy from the morning sky.”
Noel, one of the characters from the future, nails a primary reason we humans seem unwilling to change our trajectory: “People are basically narcissist xenophobes at heart. Leave you hands offa my stuff is an over-riding character trait.”
Parker and Carl slide into the year 2214 and return to 2020 determined to prevent the apocalypse they’ve witnessed from happening. If we open our eyes to changes happening right now, perhaps, like Parker and Carl, we can save the world as we know it. Room for Tomorrow offers suggestions on how to pull that monumental task off.
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Donna Meredith is the associate editor of Southern Literary Review.
