“First, do no harm, says his mother every morning at breakfast: Before anything else, first, do no harm. Her reminder before he goes to school. He tries so hard not to hurt people, not to hurt their feelings, to be gentle, truthful and loving, all the things his mother tells him all the time.”

Deborah Tomkins’ novella Aerth (2025) is the winner of the Weatherglass Novella Prize, and it’s easy to see why. I was unaware of Tomkins before this, but after reading this moving, haunting and profound novella I was excited to find out she has another novella and a novel, which I will be reading as soon as possible. Aerth is a beautifully written exploration of our current climate crisis, the destructive legacy of capitalism, and our attitude to migrants. In its exploration of a traveller between a flawed utopia and a decadent dystopia, it recalls Ursula Le Guin’s peerless The Dispossessed (1974). Like Le Guin, Tomkins sensitively draws her characters in their full humanity, and uses the cognitive estrangement of science fiction to force us to confront the uncomfortable truths about our world. Aerth is an urgent and necessary work of fiction that reminds us that there can be other, better ways of interacting with our world and with each other.

Aerth is the story of Magnus, who grows up in the rural community of Arden on the planet Aerth. Aerth could be a version of our own Earth, one which is heading towards a new ice age and the human population has been drastically reduced by a terrible pandemic. Magnus is brought up according to his planet’s customs – to do no harm, to walk gently on the earth, but he dreams of adventure. His parents want him to stay in Arden and become farmers like them, but Magnus is inspired by the news of the new Martian colonists and wants to travel to distant worlds. Following the collapse of his relationship with his childhood sweetheart Tilly, he finally shrugs off the links and responsibilities of his community to join the space programme. Astronomers have discovered Urth, a planet that is the twin of Aerth on the other side of the sun, and Magnus volunteers to be on the mission that travels to this new world via Mars. But while he is initially welcomed on Urth as a celebrity, he soon finds himself alienated by its greed, its pollution, its destructiveness. It also becomes clear that the Urth governments have neither the ability nor the desire to return him home as promised. As Magnus becomes more and more disillusioned with Urth, he goes from being a government asset to a liability. Magnus grows from an idealistic and adventurous young man into a disillusioned adult, and he experiences activism, homelessness, love, heartbreak and despair. He learns that the idyllic world of his youth may not be as innocent as he always believed, but he also learns the value of causing no harm and walking gently on the earth. 

If Aerth is a utopian echo of what our world could be, Urth is an ultra-capitalistic nightmare version of our own world, one which the reader can immediately recognize more of our Earth in than the agrarian paradise of Aerth. Yet Tomkins never takes the easy route out by making Aerth perfect – Magnus learns that the devastating plague that decimated Aerth’s human population has its roots in inequality, colonialism and eugenics, and that Aerth’s more gentle way of interacting with its environment and other people is not because of some higher morality attributable to Aerth, but hard won through suffering, pain and death. But in the hypercapitalistic world of Urth, we can recognize so much of the horrors caused by the mistakes we’ve made on our own Earth. Here is a world being destroyed by pollution, in which greed has led to horrendous inequalities and devastating wars, in which Aerth’s universal healthcare and shelter, their mutual support and community spirit, is utterly alien and unimaginable. Many of the novella’s most powerful sequence come from Magnus as an outsider looking at horror at the way Urth works, both in the gross displays of power and wealth he is exposed to as a celebrity and the uncaring indifference he faces once his government support is withdrawn and he becomes homeless. By showing us what this world looks like through an alien perspective, Tomkins wakes us anew to the horrors faced by those outcast by society. As a migrant from a different planet, Magnus experiences the full range of discrimination against immigrants, from exoticism when he first arrives to hatred and racism once he falls out of favour to disbelief and indifference from people who are unwilling or unable to imagine experiences different from their own.

Aerth is not just a well-conceived and executed thought experiment though. It succeeds as well as it does because of Tomkins’ beautiful writing, and her incredible character work. Tomkins follows Magnus throughout his life – we meet him first as a child, then follow him growing up and across his various adventures, the ups and downs of his life as he ages. Thus we get to see his perspective on his own world and the other world of Urth change and mature as he grows, something that Tomkins handles wonderfully. The maturation of Magnus, from an angry young man chaffing at the restraints of his society to someone who appreciates the wisdom of his elders and the society he grew up in, naturalistically progresses throughout the story. Tomkins is equally adept at capturing the excitement and frustrations of youth as the maturity that comes with age and experience, and watching Magnus grow as a person is a delight. All this is achieved through Tomkins’ gorgeous prose, which is lyrical and poetic. Her worlds and her characters feel real and lived in. The novella brutally strips everything away from Magnus to show us who he really is as a person, but Tomkins is still able to bring redemption and hope at the end of this story. Aerth is a stunning piece of work, beautifully constructed and profoundly moving. I look forward to reading more of Tomkins’ writing. 

Aerth is available now from Weatherglass Books – you can order your copy HERE