Climate change and the contemporary novel Introduction The ethics of posterity and the climate change novel The limits of parental care ethics: Cormac McCarthys The road and Maggie Gees The ice people Overpopulation and motherhood environmentalism: Edan Lepuckis California and Liz Jensens The road Identity ethical agency and radical posterity: Jeanette Wintersons The stone Gods and Sarah Halls The Carhullan army Science utopianism and ecocentric posterity: Kim Stanley Robinsons Science in the capital and Barbara Kingsolvers Flight behaviour Conclusion: the sense of no ending