"The first time I saw one of his spaceships, a school of dolphins was hunting it.

We didn’t realize what it was at the time. I doubt my orders would have been different if we’d known. It was rising through the waves, more like a grey-green hill than a giant jellyfish. I had expected stingers, luminescence, at least some beauty to excuse the crime, but no. I turned and watched as the hunters and their prey fell behind our boat. Then, the spaceship reached the surface and hung there, like a drowned refugee corpse, seawater rolling over it with each wave. It was well behind us once its main envelope cleared the water. Sieve lines clung under it, Half-eaten and torn. The cheated dolphins watched as it floated away to die. Even large-brained beings like them couldn’t begin to understand the changes we had created in their world.

Who then, was this man and his shanty town, genetic engineers, who thought they could?"

The New Migrants is a story about climate change, freedom, and how battling one might one day give us the other. It was first published in Francesco Verso's