LOST GIRL FEATURED IN 'LIVING IN THE END TIMES' CONFERENCE 13 - 15TH JANUARY 2021
Really chuffed, not least startled, to see that my least popular novel (Lost Girl), is being discussed this week at an academic conference hosted by Cappadocia University.
‘Living in the End Times: Utopian and Dystopian Representations of Pandemics in Fiction, Film and Culture’
The paper/panel that includes ‘Lost Girl’ is entitled: “SARS CoV11 and Other Calamities in Adam Nevill’s Lost Girl – Kübra Baysal (Ankara Yıldırım Beyazıt University, Turkey).
“In the oddly realistic world of Lost Girl, originating from extreme weather conditions and the loss of natural balance, new strains of deadly viruses take hold of the world. Predicting the coronavirus pandemic and other calamities that actually came out to be true five years later, in 2020; such as the destructive wildfires in Australia or the heatwaves in Europe among others, Lost Girl is a noteworthy cli-fi novel with its realistic touch leaving a permanent wake-up call effect on the reader to change their anthropocentric way of living through an environmentally-conscious posthuman perspective.”
Though I’ve treated every book equally in intent and effort and quality control, I often think it’s the most serious book I’ve ever tried to write. I’d also class it as my most horrific & prescient horror novel.
If you’re not familiar with the novel (I began writing it in 2013), I include a global coronavirus pandemic in the story, that spreads from bat urine in a Chinese wet market. The book is set in 2053, so I was 34 years out, on the pandemic and Aussie wildfires and other stuff that’s already happened/happening. But when I researched the book (I began as long ago as 2006), I leant to the more radical scientific predictions for the earth’s climate (for 2070); that is the most sobering thing of all.
Anyway, the whole conference looks toothsome and is free to attend online. I’ve just registered HERE.
Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation is also discussed on the same panel.