ChloroPhilia—an unsettling, enticing novella about evolution in overdrive—is Cristina Jurado’s most recent work in English. Like her collection Alphaland, which came out in English in 2018 and then was reissued in 2023, ChloroPhilia offers readers Jurado’s unique vision of the world, in which the bizarre and grotesque erupts into the mundane world.
Aliens, demons, and scavengers populate the stories of Alphaland, but this latest work concerns itself with a dismal dystopian future. Storms have started sweeping across the world, with winds that have destroyed most of the infrastructure and rendered humanity incapable of fighting back. Social order has broken down, and people try to survive in small groups, eking out an existence where they can. One of the refugees trying to survive in a destroyed city is taken to the Cloister, a kind of oasis where social order is intact and food and water are in plentiful supply. He’s not sure what he’s being asked to do there, but it has something to do with genetic engineering.
At this early point in the book, one might want to classify it as cli-fi, eco-fiction, or solarpunk, but Jurado’s work doesn’t fit easily into pre-defined categories. Nonetheless, it’s concerned with many of the same issues that authors of these developing sub-genres are interested in, and can be read alongside Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro’s anthology Solarpunk (2018) and Francesco Verso’s solarpunk series (so far, The Roamers [2023] and No/Mad/Lad [2024] are available in English).
The plot of ChloroPhilia jumps decades further into the future, where we meet Kirmen, the last child born in the Cloister. Humanity has organized itself in a series of domed habitats, where it can keep out the perpetual storms and try to pick up the pieces of civilization. Here, they cultivate what crops they can grow and raise small livestock. Kirmen was born here, but he isn’t like the other children. The doctor who spends so much time with him is using him as a guinea pig for his experiments. What those experiments are for, exactly, is unclear, but we eventually learn that Kirmen is supposed to be the first in what may be a new race of human that can actually survive outside of the domes.
Kirmen is slowly becoming more treelike, his lips changing shape and his skin becoming rougher and darker as time goes on. During all the time that Kirmen spends with the doctor, he learns about what the Earth used to be like: how the sky was blue and dotted with clouds, how the sea used to stretch beyond the horizon. To Kirmen, these stories seem impossible, but the doctor’s words make him want to imagine what a world like that could be, if it were possible again.
Meanwhile, people in the Cloister are starting to grow angrier as the number of miscarriages increases. The doctor, to whom they appeal for answers, seems to have given up on helping the humans under the domes, focusing instead on finding out what Kirmen is capable of. Meanwhile, Kirmen—having lived his whole life feeling different from the other children and estranged from his father, who spends less and less time with him—starts to realize that his mother, whom he distrusts, has a mysterious relationship with the doctor.
A bewildering encounter between his close friend Jana and the doctor sets off some kind of chain reaction. Kirmen finds that he is suddenly expanding past the limits of the dome. In his expansion, he kills Jana and begins to realize that he can connect with the Earth in a way he has never experienced before. From him grow more shoots and growths, as if Kirmen is birthing a new kind of civilization from his own body. This tantalizing promise is where the novel ends, at once frustrating our wish for a clear conclusion but also opening up interesting future possibilities.
One might think that a story like this would need a longer format, and I would have loved to have learned more about Kirmen’s development and the kinds of experiments that the doctor was doing—both on him and on the other specimens in his office. Perhaps Jurado’s plan is to expand upon this story in the future. But as it stands now, ChloroPhilia offers an engaging and unique look at how humanity might adapt to radically changed conditions on Planet Earth.