Journey beyond the world’s end

Wealthy people promise technology to empower mankind, but it is the real and broken people in Jennifer Mills’s new novel who aim to save the world.

Jennifer Mills is the author of Salvage

The literary market is filled with books about the ­collapse of the natural world. I released my own such novel recently, while literary critic Beejay ­Silcox reckons “we live in the golden age of nature writing”.

Finding titles with hope and something new to say can be a challenge. Enter Jennifer Mills with her speculative fiction novel Salvage.

Salvage’s chief protagonist is Jude, a no-nonsense truck driver and scavenger. She’s forever with one foot out the door, belonging to nowhere and no one, though she seems to have made a life for herself driving for the survivor’s commune of Northport. The community is based in the Freelands, where people are “sorted for use like materials”, surviving on the detritus of collapsed civilisations.

Salvage by Jennifer Mills

Set after a major war, where the world’s borders have been rewritten between company freeholds, paranoid new nation states and presumed wastelands, Salvage is an intense puzzle that doesn’t offer you the corner pieces to start from. Readers are thrust into the story, following three timelines: the past, the space station Endeavour and Jude’s journey out of Newport.

In Jude’s past we learn that she is the adopted daughter of the Prince family, who are billionaire mining magnates. Her birth parents, and the community they were a part of, were doomed into sickness and death by the activities of the mines. While her adoptive family’s wealth was never threatened by this tragedy – written off as a cost of doing business – perhaps their rearing of Jude is something of a penance.

Raised in an elite, secure compound while the rest of the world collapses, a young Jude doesn’t feel at home among the rich trappings, preferring to wander beyond the security of its walls, poking the desert.

Jude’s one true anchor is her sister Celeste, the birth child and heir to the Prince family fortune. The trouble is, Celeste is unanchored to Earth, quite literally – she invests in space-faring technology to abandon the planet, convinced it is dying.

While Jude escapes the family compound and runs away to take her chances, penniless and in the wild, Celeste journeys with other billionaires beyond Earth’s moon in the space station ­Endeavour, semi-suspended to life support machines in torpor, a state like intense hibernation. It is on this station that the second timeline of Salvage plays out, following an increasingly confused Celeste, her body atrophying, her mind becoming ravaged.

The mission is a failure. Back on Earth, Jude learns that all aboard perished.

Years go by and Jude makes herself useful in the Freelands, ferrying salvage and refugees in her truck. One day an escape pod washes up among the salvage and Jude discovers her sister’s emaciated body inside. Celeste is alive after all this time, albeit weak, barely clinging to existence.

This is the third strand of the novel – Jude’s sense of care for a sister she abandoned, the same sister who tried to abandon Earth itself.

When Celeste is taken by the powerful Alliance, a technologically advanced civilisation on the rise, Jude sets out to get her ­sister back.

Salvage is less the work of a fantastical imagination and more one of extrapolation. Droughts, societal collapse, famines, floods – all the ingredients of the kind of apocalypse we’re slowly experiencing in the real world are rendered in rich, contemplative, literary prose.

Salvage isn’t as interested in the details of doom. Mills prefers to explore the slow-motion consequences of overconsumption and disregard for ecosystems; its catastrophes are inevitable, but they aren’t sudden.

While it has flourishes of science fiction, its bedrock is familial drama. Fans of Ursula K. Le Guin or Brad Pitt’s Ad Astra will find themselves at home among its pages.

Salvage is a powerful, slow burn novel about compassion, purpose and the endurance of love.

The strength of the book is in Jude’s determination to live a decent, quiet life of service to others. Mills eschews traditional formats of dystopian storytelling in favour of exploring compassionate alternatives to existence in hardship. I found myself thinking of photos and stories of the Great Depression more than post-apocalyptic fictions.

Refreshingly, it also has excesses of hope. This isn’t a world where it matters whether the glass is half full or half empty; what matters is that humanity is still making glass.

The threading of the novel is complex and generally rewarding. Often the writing keeps the reader distant; a deliberate distance that gradually meters out plot, teasing exposition which arrives in a nonlinear, almost dreamlike fashion. In some ways we experience the story the way Celeste’s broken mind assembles its own narrative; and while I did find her chapters on the station grew tedious over time, the novel never loses its thrust.

The characters of the story often make frustrating decisions, and core protagonist Jude does her best to be unlikeable, wearing her caution like armour. Her answer to many questions is “I’m exhausted”, which protracts events, delays decisions, and saw me indenting the pages I was squeezing them so tightly. Though perhaps the novel saw this coming: “books remember their readers”, it says of such marks.

In lesser hands the story’s enigmatic structure could sour the experience, but Mills displays an uncommon skill. Her world-building is deep and grounded, delicately threading the numerous characters and their strands into a meaningful, memorable conclusion.

Ultimately we’re invited to understand Jude not by what she says and thinks, but by her actions. Contradiction is at the heart of the meaning of Salvage: while shiny, wealthy people promise industry & technology that will save and empower mankind, their efforts are at the forefront of the world’s destruction. Meanwhile everyday people, dirty and rundown, broken and exhausted, get in and do the real work of life.

“If you can help, help” is the philosophy of the Freelanders. In times as troubled as ours, such refreshing wisdom wouldn’t go astray.

Cadance Bell’s new book is Letters To Our
Robot Son.

About the author

Jennifer Mills is the author of the novels The Airways (Picador, 2021), Dyschronia (Picador, 2018), Gone (UQP, 2011) and The Diamond Anchor (UQP, 2009) and a collection of short stories, The Rest is Weight (UQP, 2012). She has been short-listed for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, and for the Aurealis Awards for horror. She received the Barbara Hanrahan Fellowship from the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature in 2014. Earlier awards include the 2008 Marian Eldridge Award for Young Emerging Women Writers, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, and the Northern Territory Literary Awards. Mills’ creative residencies include time at Varuna and Bundanon in NSW, an Asialink residency in Beijing in 2010, and a residency at Yaddo in New York in 2015. She was fiction editor for the Overland literary journal from 2012-2018; she is a director of the Australian Society of Authors, and she was recently awarded an SA Literary Fellowship for 2025.