The Great Clean-Up

London, 2025. Plastic rains from the sky and clings to the trees. Walls of waste draw new borders, the last pack ice is melting, and in the big cities nearly everyone escapes into dream drugs. Resignation rules, embodied by the popular party Live With. Jeremy Parker, a twenty-nine-year-old nanotechnology engineer in Beckenham, still has a dream of his own: to clean up the planet.

In his laboratory he designs invisible nanomodules that scrub bathrooms, strip away clothing and devour metal, the last of them a weapon ordered by the British Army. Meanwhile, high in the Nepalese Himalaya, his friend Yvan Wong, a climatologist and mountaineer, watches a mountain lake grow warm and then release a colossal column of air and water into the sky. All over the world, animals begin to change.

When the power Jeremy has created slips beyond human control, a civilization built on iron and oil starts to crumble, and humankind must learn to live alongside animals that are no longer what they were.

Written in 2010, The Great Clean-Up is a speculative fable that follows engineers, mountaineers, sailors and their animal companions through the end of one age and the uncertain birth of another.