Excerpt taken from the book - This inhospitable planet

[Adam]

It was difficult to accurately describe the effects the landscape had on the narrowing remnants of humanity as they struggled on; of waking each day and knowing there had once been a previous morning filled with blue sky and sunlight and densely packed woods – jungles even – where it was the greenest leaves an imagination can summon that blocked the light, and not an ever-present, single mantle of various hues of grey. Which generation more keenly felt the injustice it was hard to say: no-one really knew how long it had been like this; the young looked to the old and tried to blame them; the old looked to the young and despaired that nothing had changed and this was the world they’d brought them into. Some settlements, Calix heard, had disappeared not from resource deprivation, in-fighting or inter-settlement war, but from choice: deciding not to bear any more children. The last of the living the last of the dead. Wanderers left with no choice but to burn the entrance door that could only be opened from the inside. Finding a single body slumped in a chair in the centre of the courtyard. Others elsewhere. Skin crinkling, thin as hemp-paper; threads hanging from unhemmed edges. The Agridome a barren womb. In contrast, other settlements became overpopulated, children running amok beneath the extended bellies of pregnant women; some lips cut or foreheads protruding or limbs shortened from sibling and cousin love as the pool in which they bred grew ever smaller. Each one as loved as the one before and the one after. Happiness sought and found in the only place it could be. Rations themselves rationed until the cutting took its toll and there were too many mouths to feed. Or else too many people to heal as something like typhoid or dysentery spread, leaving the infirm to die of starvation, or the children to gnaw like rats on dog carcasses before crawling out of the ever-open entrance to die in the sand.