A Friend of the Earth was published by Viking in 2000. Ty Tierwater, a former environmental radical, lives in 2025 in a California devastated by climate change — perpetual rain, extinct species, collapsed ecosystems. He works as a caretaker for exotic animals on the estate of a washed-up pop star. The novel alternates between this degraded future and flashbacks to the 1990s, when Tierwater was an eco-activist: spiking trees, sabotaging logging equipment, going to prison, losing his daughter to the cause.
The novel is Boyle’s most explicitly environmental and his most prescient: written in 2000, it imagines a 2025 (now our present) in which climate change has radically altered California. Some of its predictions proved conservative — the real 2025 California faces drought, fire, and atmospheric rivers more extreme than Boyle imagined. The novel’s argument — that individual activism is futile against systemic forces, but that the impulse toward it is nonetheless honorable — gives it a melancholy unusual in Boyle’s work.
Prescience
Published in 2000, the novel imagined a 2025 California wrecked by climate change. The actual 2025 has proven even worse than Boyle predicted — the fires, the floods, the drought cycles. This accidental prescience has renewed interest in the novel as both fiction and prophecy.
Collecting A Friend of the Earth
First edition (Viking, New York, 2000): Boards with dust jacket.
Approximate market values:
- Fine in dust jacket: $30–$60
- Very good: $15–$30
Projected values (2026–2036): Moderate to strong appreciation as the novel’s climate predictions continue to be validated.
Frequently Asked Questions
How accurate were Boyle’s 2025 predictions? Remarkably so. The novel imagined a California battered by extreme weather, species extinction, and ecosystem collapse — all of which have materialised, in some cases more severely than Boyle predicted.