The paper to be presented offers a close reading of three recent South African novels, namely The Child (2024) and It Doesn’t Have to be This Way (2022), both by Alistair Mackay, and The Queer Book of Revelations (2024) by Siya Khumalo. These novels map different forms of resource scarcity, societal collapse, mass surveillance, and/or extreme forms of structural inequality. For Mackay, these hinge on the imminent environmental catastrophe brought on by climate change. For Khumalo, the risks emanate from a powerful artificial intelligence network. What cuts across all three novels, though, are the strong same-sex relationships, friendships and intimacies that function as the emotional impetus that drives each of the texts. These characters and relationships offer something of a reparative balm within the dystopian futures envisioned in two of the novels, and the water-scarce present in the third. In this, these novels offer an alternative activist aesthetic – grounded in queer kinship and homoerotic relationalities – that challenges the structuring inequality and injustices of the imagined present. In short, the paper asks: If the worlds envisioned in these novels depict levels of suffering, fear and/or alienation that themselves have come to define normative daily life (at least within the logics of the novels), then what does it mean for the reparative potential of queerness as both an activist agenda and as a metonymic standard-bearer for a broader human rights-orientated polity?