Prof. Christine Evans 

River & Maude is a novel-in-progress set in a world where AI, living creatures, and “forever chemicals” meld into new life forms in a plastics-saturated, post-natural environment. A young girl, River, lives with the ex-biologist, middle-aged Maude, under a bridge in a flooded world. Knowing no other people, River’s radical loneliness drives her to use the debris around her to build a companion, which comes to life in unpredictable ways. When Maude suddenly vanishes, River befriends a crow to help track her down, but the creature is a complex ally: a melded AI-bio-drone with surveillance duties.

River & Maude draws on scientific and technical research, folk-tales and literature about human-made monsters, and philosophies of the post-human to resist apocalyptic narratives about the climate crisis while centering the experience of women and girls, placing the novel in a fabulist and feminist strand of literature that invokes invention as a spell for survival in perceived end-times.